Poster #21 - Impact of the Restaurant Meals Program on SNAP Participation among Older Adults

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

Older adults remain substantially under-enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), despite facing elevated risks of food insecurity and significant barriers related to mobility, transportation, and meal preparation. Because SNAP benefits are typically limited to groceries and exclude hot prepared meals, the program may be less usable for some older adults in practice. The Restaurant Meals Program (RMP) is a SNAP policy option that allows eligible recipients to purchase hot prepared meals from authorized restaurants. This paper examines whether expanding benefit usability through RMP increases SNAP participation among older adults in California.

I use household-level American Community Survey data for California from 2005 to 2019 and link these data to county-level RMP rollout timing. The analysis focuses on likely SNAP-eligible older households aged 60--79 and exploits staggered county adoption of RMP prior to the 2021 statewide expansion. The main empirical approach uses repeated-cross-section difference-in-differences with the Callaway and Sant'Anna estimator to account for staggered treatment timing and heterogeneous effects across cohorts and periods.

The results suggest that RMP may increase SNAP participation among older adults, although the overall evidence remains suggestive rather than conclusive. In the main specification, the estimated overall effect is approximately 2.3 percentage points, and alternative specifications are generally positive but imprecisely estimated. A clearer pattern emerges in heterogeneity analysis within the near-poor subgroup, defined as households with income between 115\% and 200\% of the federal poverty line. For single-male households, the estimated effect is consistently positive, statistically significant, and ranges from 3.5 to 3.9 percentage points across specifications. One possible explanation is that older men living alone may face greater barriers to shopping for and preparing food at home, making standard grocery-only SNAP benefits less useful in practice. By expanding benefit usability, RMP may therefore generate a stronger participation response for this group. Taken together, the findings suggest that expanding benefit usability may matter most for specific vulnerable subgroups, particularly near-poor older adults living alone, even if average effects for the broader sample remain imprecisely estimated.

Author

• Xiaoyi Chi, North Carolina State University
  Presenting Author