​The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted school meal operations and has contributed to lasting supply chain issues affecting the cost and availability of food and labor. The School Food Authority Survey II on Supply Chain Disruption and Student Participation was administered to all SFAs operating child nutrition programs in schools to gather information on the impacts of continued supply chain disruptions and the return to standard operations during SY 2022–23.

The physical presence waiver, issued under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act of 2020, allowed WIC state and local agencies to remotely certify participants into WIC during the COVID-19 pandemic. This report summarizes data collected from surveys of WIC state and local agencies about the use of the physical presence waiver and the impact it had on WIC services.

FNS is committed to providing WIC participants with access to a variety of safe and healthy foods, including infant formula, and strongly encourages WIC state agencies to take expedient action to ensure that WIC participants can exchange recalled product on hand, and can use WIC benefits in their EBT balance or on paper WIC food instruments to purchase product that has not been recalled

The Farm to School Census and Comprehensive Review includes the 2019 Farm to School Census; a descriptive review of the USDA Farm to School grant program; a review of published research on farm to school since 2010; and a set of interviews with school food distributors. 

Phase II was a methodological study, conducted in six sites during 2015–2016, to test an approach to determine its feasibility for a national evaluation.

The USDA Food and Nutrition Service’s 1990 WIC Medicaid Study I found that prenatal WIC participation was associated with improved birth outcomes and savings in Medicaid costs. A 2003 study by Buescher, et al., found that WIC participation during childhood was associated with increased health care utilization and Medicaid costs, and concluded that WIC enhanced children’s linkages to the health care system.

The CACFP Sponsor and Provider Characteristics Study is focused on the child care component of the CACFP, which provides federal funds for meals and snacks served to children in public or private child care centers, Head Start programs, outside-school-hours care centers, afterschool care programs, emergency shelters, and day care homes. The study also covered centers that participate in the At-Risk Afterschool (At-Risk) component, which provides meals to children and youth through age 18.

WIC Participant and Program Characteristics 2016 (PC 2016) summarizes the demographic characteristics of participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nationwide in April 2016. It includes information on participant income and nutrition risk characteristics, estimates breastfeeding initiation rates for WIC infants, and describes WIC members of migrant farm-worker families. PC 2016 is the most recent in a series of reports generated from WIC state management information system data biennially since 1992.