Ileana Arroyo pushed a shopping cart down tidy aisles of fresh produce, whole grains, baby food and other items at a small grocery store in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago. Ms. Arroyo, who was shopping for food for her four children, scanned a wall of cereal. Above the brightly colored boxes, a sign read, “Be the mom you want to be.”
The store is part of a federal food program that provides free groceries and baby formula to about 6.6 million low-income women and children in the United States, including nearly 40 percent of all infants nationwide. But despite its broad reach, participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC, has fallen in recent years. Only half of eligible women and children are enrolled.
Experts say the program’s limited food choices have been a barrier. In response, program officials announced this year that WIC would significantly broaden the variety of foods on offer, hoping to reach a bigger and more diverse group of women and children. Lactose-intolerant and vegan participants can now buy soy or almond milk, instead of dairy products. Grain choices, once limited to pasta and sliced bread, now include amaranth, blue corn tortillas, wild rice, teff, naan and quinoa. And all recipients will have access to more fruit and vegetables. States have two years to implement the changes, but some, including Illinois, have already started rolling them out.
At the heart of the changes is the growing body of evidence that good food is essential to health, protecting women from pregnancy complications, saving infants’ lives and reducing the rate of malnutrition in children.
Loading up her minivan after checking out, Ms. Arroyo, 34, said that the program had helped her save money every month since she enrolled in 2021. Now, the expanded options have made it easier to make more nutritious meals her children will eat.
“Before, they didn’t have Hispanic food, like Goya beans,” she said. “Now they are offering more of the foods that I actually feed my kids.”
WIC, established by Congress in 1974, covers pregnant women and mothers with infants and children up to age 5 who are at risk of food insecurity or nutritional deficits. To be eligible, a participant’s family income cannot exceed more than 185 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $37,800 for a family of two. Citizenship is not a requirement.
Participants meet for free with a physician, nurse or nutritionist when they enroll, and are allocated a predetermined monthly food “package,” such as a bundle for breastfeeding women. Participants can choose specific items within prescribed food groups in their package and shop for them with a WIC debit card at a regular grocery store, farmers’ market or government-run storefront like the one Ms. Arroyo shops at.
“We kind of think of WIC as the granddaddy of ‘food is medicine’ because it is about providing a specific food package that is tailored to prevent or ameliorate specific risks,” said Cindy Long, head of the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Science division, which oversees WIC. Research has shown that the program can reduce infant mortality, preterm births and anemia in children, among other benefits.
“It’s a really great sort of domino effect, said Dr. Lanre Falusi, a pediatrician at Children’s National in Washington, D.C. “Once we’re able to address the families’ food insecurity and nutritional deficits with this program, we see overall improvements in health.”
The rise in food insecurity in the United States — about 47 million people had limited or uncertain access to nutritious food in 2023 — has made it all the more surprising that WIC’s enrollment numbers haven’t increased, experts said. Part of the problem is that the kinds of food covered historically haven’t reflected the diversity of the program’s beneficiaries. About 40 percent of beneficiaries are Hispanic.
“Participants told us, ‘Why don’t they ask us what we actually eat?’ Bread and pasta weren’t always aligned with their cultural preferences,” said Dr. Aditi Vasan, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an author of a recent study examining barriers to WIC participation. Other barriers include the challenge of trying to figure out which products are covered at regular grocery stores, and the stigma of using a WIC card at checkout.
Doshaye Hatcher and her partner, Ashley Leflore, enrolled in WIC in May, when their toddler, Dior, turned 6 months old and began eating solid food. On a recent trip to a grocery store in Chicago, the couple, both vegetarian, added fresh spinach, tofu, a pineapple and bulgur wheat to their shopping cart while keeping an eye on Dior.
Ms. Hatcher, a food prep worker at the University of Chicago Medicine, said the program had saved her family hundreds of dollars on monthly grocery bills. More important, she said, it had guided them toward healthy foods that they might otherwise not eat, like whole wheat bagels for Dior to snack on.
“Everything about new motherhood is a little scary,” she said. “But this helps to make sure you’re doing the right thing when it comes to feeding him.”
