Arkansas’ SNAP Waiver Faces Retail Pushback: “This Isn’t Workable”

Explain it like I’m 5 version

🥤 Arkansas received federal permission back in June to block SNAP from being used to buy soda, candy, and other junk food starting in 2026.

🤔 Lawmakers are unhappy with the state’s lack of a plan on how that gets implemented at the retail level — which right now is putting the burden on retailers.

🛒 That means thousands of products, constant changes, and huge risk if a store gets it wrong. Big chains might manage it. Small-town grocers won’t.

👎 Lawmakers say if DHS doesn’t rethink the rollout, many small stores will drop SNAP entirely, which hurts the communities that rely on them most.

🤝 Senator Jonathan Dismang told DHS to go back to the drawing board, meet with retailers and come up with a better rollout plan.

Deep Dive Version

Lawmakers warn that DHS’s implementation plan could shut small grocers out of the program.

Arkansas is one of the first states in the country to receive federal approval to restrict SNAP purchases of candy, soda, and other unhealthy foods. But as details of the rollout emerge, lawmakers are sounding the alarm— not over the policy itself, but over how the state plans to make retailers enforce it.

At a November 18 meeting of the ALC Peer Subcommittee, Senator Jonathan Dismang raised sharp concerns that the Department of Human Services’ current plan “will be a failure” if the state doesn’t rethink how retailers are expected to classify which foods are ineligible under the waiver.

The flashpoint:
DHS is placing the burden of product classification on retailers in Arkansas.

What DHS Is Proposing

DHS Director of County Operations Mary Franklin told lawmakers that the agency plans to use the GS1 framework, a global product-classification system used by large retailers, to define which foods are disallowed under the waiver.

But GS1 is not a single master list of all products. It’s a product-attribute database that:

• Only large chains typically subscribe to
• Is expensive
• Doesn’t include every item sold in small stores
• Must be interpreted and mapped manually to determine eligibility

The agency presented three “options” for retailers:

Franklin said the state has been meeting with retailers and that DHS intends to implement the waiver in July 2026.

Why Retailers Say These Options Won’t Work

Senator Dismang cut directly to the core problem: None of these options are realistic for the majority of Arkansas grocery stores.

Most Arkansas retailers—especially small, rural grocers—do not subscribe to GS1 attribute data, do not have POS systems capable of mapping GS1 codes, and carry products that don’t have GS1 nutrition attributes at all.

Dismang warned that DHS is underestimating the complexity of classifying foods in real time:

“There are hundreds of new products created and offered daily. And what we’re asking our retailers to do is bear the burden… Shifting that cost to a retailer may be cost effective to DHS, but it is not for our small retailers in the state.”

The core problem everywhere: roughly 650,000 food products are sold nationwide, with 20,000 new ones introduced each year. Without a centralized, state-maintained list of ineligible items, every retailer essentially has to build and update its own database – or guess and hope federal auditors agree.

The result, he argued, would be predictable:

“What I am scared you’re going to do is create a scenario where entities, probably in areas that they need it the most, are not going to be able to offer SNAP because of the risk associated with not appropriately categorizing an item. Your path will be a failure.”

Arkansas isn’t alone in this

Arkansas is not navigating this alone. At least 11 other states – including Nebraska, Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, and Indiana – have received similar waivers for 2026. Early feedback from those states mirrors Arkansas’ debate:

Texas chose a narrower definition (drinks with more than 5 grams of added sugar), hoping for clearer lines, but even there, independent stores say the administrative load is steep.

Nebraska grocers have complained about the cost and complexity of retraining staff and reprogramming registers.

Indiana retailers worry about customers driving across state lines to buy restricted items where rules are looser.

The consequences to retailers for miscategorizing a food is pretty high – it can trigger federal penalties during a compliance or ‘secret shopper’ check. To avoid these, small stores may drop SNAP entirely to avoid the risk.

Franklin said DHS did not intend to burden retailers or push them out of the program:

“It is not our intention at all to cause retailers to not be able to participate… We want to keep all the retailers possible.”

Waiver background and benefits

The headache of implementation may make one wonder why we need it in the first place. The short answer is that the many of the foods people are buying with SNAP are making them (and their children) unhealthy. Here are a few stats:

A 2015 study found that people on SNAP were 3 times more likely to be obese than those who were eligible for SNAP but not on it.

A 2016 USDA study found that only about 40% of SNAP money is actually spent on healthy foods like meat, cheese and milk. A solid 20% is purely junk food, with about half that going to soda. And the other 40% is ‘maybe’ foods– some that may be healthy, some not. Think frozen meals, nuts, condiments, etc. This study uses data from 2011, so the breakdowns could be worse now.

Most people on SNAP are also on some form of government-funded healthcare. Thus, taxpayers are picking up the tab for both the poor diet choices that make people sick and the healthcare costs resulting from those.

Key data on taxpayer impacts: