This study uses calendar year 2011 point-of-sale transaction data from a leading grocery retailer to examine the food choices of SNAP and non-SNAP households . On average, each month's transaction data contained over 1 billion records of food items bought by 26.5 million households in 127 million unique transactions.

This study examined the feasibility of creating a data collection system capable of directly and automatically providing USDA with item-level data on purchases made by SNAP households. Data would be captured at the point of sale from purchases made using EBT cards.

This study identifies how spending patterns, such as the rate at which households spend their benefit, changed following the ARRA benefit increase and analyzes how spending patterns differed across household characteristics, time and states.

The report is based on a telephone survey of all states with SLEB agreements and case studies of 6 states with noteworthy levels of SLEB agreement-generated activity.