Produce Marketplace, a small market on St. Clair Street in Clairton’s business district, lives up to its name. Full of fruits and vegetables, on a recent Saturday, tables were stacked with multiple varieties of apples, oranges, bananas, pears, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and fresh kale. Shoppers could also buy deli meats, cheeses, dairy items, and other groceries.
But there’s one thing shoppers here can’t do — they can’t buy groceries using the WIC program, a federally funded nutrition program for low-income mothers and their kids.
Officials with the Mon Valley Initiative, the nonprofit that runs the store, say they’d like to be able to participate in WIC, but program rules prevent it because the shop isn’t open enough hours.
“We'd be delighted to accept WIC benefits, because it certainly would just dovetail right into our mission statement,” of providing nutritious food in an underserved, impoverished area, said Felix Fusco, the store’s manager.
“We have a number of requests [for the program]” Fusco said. “It's dying down now because, you know, we've been here five years telling people, no, we can't do WIC.”
At the intersection of health, nutrition, and child development, the federally funded Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, commonly called WIC, aims to provide nutritious food to pregnant women and young children.
“It really comes at a time that is so essential for a child’s life. And that that's a time that you can't really get back for a kid. You can't rewind and say, ‘Whoops, we missed that time,’” said Cristina Codario, policy director at Pittsburgh-based nonprofit Allies for Children, which has made recommendations to modernize the program and boost WIC enrollment.
But recipients not being able to use the program at a store like Clairton’s Produce Marketplace is just one example of how WIC sometimes doesn’t live up to its potential, some advocates say, with cumbersome rules for retailers, and burdensome paperwork and frequent appointment requirements for participating mothers. Advocates have for years been sounding alarms about declining participation, pointing out that lower enrollment leads to decreased funding for the program, and thus a potential downward spiral as less robust funding can mean less outreach, fewer staff, and longer wait times for families.
WIC participation has fallen nationally, statewide and locally, though it has started to go back up in the last few years. State and local health officials who administer WIC say they are working to boost the number of families who are able to use the program and point to some recent figures as evidence that long declines in enrollment have turned the corner and are trending upward.
Locally, Allegheny County’s WIC program will start offering some telehealth appointments in April — meaning recipients will not be required to make certain in-person visits — in order to make it easier for participants who struggle with transportation or whose work schedule might make it difficult to attend an in-person appointment, said Lisa Matt, WIC program manager for the Allegheny County Health Department.
The county also opened two new clinics last year — one at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital and another at a pediatrics office — to make it easier for parents to enroll.
The department will also soon hit the road with its mobile WIC van, making it easier to reach more people in their communities, Matt said. She also said the agency is working on strategies to help smaller retailers with some of the start-up costs to participate in the program, such as for the specific point of sale equipment stores need.
In Allegheny County, WIC participation stands around 9,900 people — a number that’s increased in the past several months, but is still significantly lower than the 13,000 people enrolled before the pandemic.
Matt said she’s hoping some recent new hires can help by making it easier for people to schedule appointments.
One continuing challenge? Pennsylvania’s “offline” system still requires benefits to be physically loaded onto cards every three months — meaning those enrolled in the program must visit WIC offices in person, use a drop box, send their cards through the mail and have them mailed back.
This can discourage participation, some advocates say.
“It's not like you just have to fill out paperwork once a year. It's an every-three-months-you-have-to-do-something process,” said Ann Sanders, public policy advocate with anti-hunger group Just Harvest.
State officials said the system will be modernized by 2026, and benefits will be able to be issued remotely by then.
Nationally, WIC participation had been declining for some time, though that trend started to reverse in 2022 and 2023, likely at least in part because of some pandemic-era changes that allowed for some remote appointments, and because of more generous federal benefits available for people to buy fruits and vegetables, said Katie Bergh, a WIC expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
“The reasons why people choose to participate or not participate in WIC are complicated,” Bergh said, noting that the program has historically had lower participation than some other assistance programs and required more in-person, frequent appointments. “We're very encouraged by the fact that the trend of participation decline has reversed, quite quickly. And that now it seems that more and more eligible families are getting connected to WIC and experiencing and receiving all of the wonderful benefits that the WIC program provides,” she said.
Statewide, WIC participation stands at around 179,000 individuals. That’s an increase of about 24,000 in the last two years, but still well below the roughly 250,000 people participating in WIC in Pennsylvania ten years ago.
While noting that some factors are outside of the state’s control, like birth rates, food costs and inflation, “overall, our program is moving in the right and positive direction,” said Sally Zubairu-Cofield, who directs the state’s WIC program.
She said her agency has worked hard to make the program work better and be more flexible. Last year, for the first time, WIC shoppers in Pennsylvania were able to use self-checkouts at Walmart stores — “a huge deal to us,” Zubairu-Cofield said, and an example of the kinds of changes she said her agency is working to make.
For more information about applying to WIC in Pennsylvania: https://www.pawic.com/OnlineApplication.aspx
