Impact of Potential Changes to WIC Food Packages

In January 2017 the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) published their final report Reviewing the WIC Food Package: Improving Balance and Choice. The report, written by an Expert Committee charged with reviewing the current WIC food package and making recommendations for changes, provides a detailed account of how the WIC food package could be improved to better support the mission of WIC while maintaining cost neutrality.

NASEM’s process of collecting and reviewing the available data to make recommendations illuminated areas where additional research would be valuable. Importantly, a number of the recommendations for research, if pursued, would provide more robust data that could a) inform future reviews of the WIC food package and b) enable states to compare data with one another.

NASEM recommended in their report that FNS fund and support research to:

• Evaluate the effects of the recommended revisions to the WIC food packages on participant satisfaction, participation in the program, redemption of WIC foods, and participants’ diets and health.
• Collect and analyze data on the impact of breastfeeding incentives in the WIC food package on infant feeding choice.
• Examine how breastfeeding data are captured by Management Information Systems (MIS) and work toward standard breastfeeding indicators that can be used across the full range of MIS systems currently used in WIC.
• Collect WIC state agency policies on an annual basis and establish a national database of EBT expenditures by program participants.

In addition to the NASEM recommendations above, research on the impact of potential changes to the WIC food packages on vendors and communities would be helpful in documenting broader effects.