Are the merchants who accept EBT online, building their own payment solutions or relying on third-party companies like Forage?

A significant number of them got online via Instacart. Our COO, Ofek Lavian, is the former head of product for payments at Instacart, and he and his team facilitated more than 50% of those stores. He made Instacart fully compliant in terms of being able to process these benefits. Many of these merchants actually don't have EBT on their own website—for example, Ralphs and Safeway don’t offer this capability outside Instacart today. Amazon and Walmart were some of the first to actually execute on this. They were one of six or so companies who were accepted into the initial USDA pilot program to accept SNAP EBT online. 

Right now, Forage is more for merchants who don’t have the bandwidth to enact it. Instacart had an army of people working on this and it took them about nine months to execute—Walmart and Amazon took about 18 months. The resources to execute on this include engineering, compliance, and a full-stack team to ensure merchants can accept these benefits and also get government approval. Most grocers don’t have the resources, and that’s where Forage comes in, to assist on the process.