Grocery prices have risen sharply in recent years, increasing households’ financial stress, especially for those at risk of food insecurity. Have higher food prices affected households’ use of public or private food assistance? We study how food price changes affect household-level participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and use of food pantries. We link household-level administrative records on food pantry visits and SNAP benefits receipt and redemption activity, and merge those with monthly grocery price indices constructed from food retail scanner data in a sixcounty region of New York State from January 2019 to June 2021. Higher grocery prices increase both SNAP participation and food pantry use, leading to more frequent pantry visits and faster within-month exhaustion of SNAP benefits. Although statistically significantly, these food assistance behavioral responses to food price increases are small in absolute terms, however. By comparison, changes in local unemployment rates have a substantially larger association with increased food pantry use.
