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