How Thrive Market unlocked millions in incremental sales with Forage

With Forage, Thrive Market enabled EBT as a payment method, building a 8-figure EBT run-rate business in less than a quarter.

Cover Image for How Thrive Market unlocked millions in incremental sales with Forage
EBT SNAP Volume (to-date)
$4M
Average EBT Basket Size
$105
Projected Annual Revenue Increase
+$40M
Thrive Market

Thrive Market

  • IntegrationCustom Checkout
  • IndustryPlatform
  • Company Size501–1000
  • HeadquartersMarina del Rey, CA

Overview

42M Americans receive government assistance to purchase groceries. Of those, over 12M households used their EBT SNAP benefits online. To further expand their options and increase access to affordable, healthy groceries, Thrive Market tapped Forage to enable EBT SNAP online.

Thrive Market was launched in November 2014 to address the geographical and monetary challenges barring communities from accessing healthy food. Thrive Market currently serves over a million unique customers, and is a certified public-benefit B corporation.

Challenge

On February 26th, 2024, Thrive Market became the nation’s first Online-Only grocer to accept EBT SNAP benefits. While Thrive Market had always wanted to enable EBT SNAP, it was initially deterred by legacy payments processors (TPPs) that lacked:

  • Best-In-Class Payments APIs & SDKs
  • >99.9% Reliability & Uptime
  • USDA Expertise & Certification Support

Approach

Thrive Market partnered with Forage. Forage quickly integrated with Thrive Market, and in parallel guided the team through USDA certification. In addition to providing technical & regulatory support, Forage further partnered with Thrive Market’s GTM, Marketing, & Growth teams on perfecting their EBT SNAP launch plan.

In addition to partnering with top publications to amplify press, Forage provided EBT SNAP consumer insights, marketing best practices, & strategic recommendations guiding launch, from Day 0 to 90D+ planning. Forage’s exclusive partnership with Propel further expanded Thrive Market’s reach to an audience of +5M verified SNAP shopper MAUs.

Last updated October 1st, 2024

About Forage

Forage builds payments infrastructure that processes government benefits, starting with enabling merchants to accept SNAP EBT payments online, and allowing the 42 million Americans who receive government assistance to digitally purchase their groceries. Forage is the only USDA-approved third-party payment processor (TPP) that offers their partners best-in-class software combined with dedicated service, enabling complex government payments online and guiding retailers through USDA authorization. For more information visit www.joinforage.com.

"We handpicked Forage as our payment processor for their exclusive USDA approval and strong integration capabilities. Their seasoned team, specializing in government payments, played a pivotal role in our effort to become the first online-only retailer to accept SNAP EBT."

Sasha SiddharthaCo-Founder & Chief Technology Officer

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