What employers miss when they try to help workers buy groceries

The problem is bigger than a bad grocery month

If you’re trying to understand food insecurity at work, start with this: a paycheck does not always cover groceries. A recent temporary disruption to SNAP was a reminder of how many Americans depend on government help to feed themselves and their families, according to HR Brew. That is true even for people who are working.

HR Brew cites US Department of Agriculture data showing that more than half of all US households classified as “food-insecure” had at least one adult working full-time between 2017 and 2023. That matters because it changes the question employers should ask. The issue is not whether someone has a job. It is whether their job leaves enough room in the budget for food after rent, child care, health costs, and everything else.

Employers get stuck when they treat food insecurity as a one-off crisis

A lot of employer responses start from the idea that food insecurity only shows up when something goes wrong for a short time. That leads to limited fixes: a gift card here, a pantry drive there, a seasonal campaign when the problem gets attention.

Those steps can help in the moment, but they miss the pattern in the data HR Brew points to. Working full time has not been enough for many households for years. If the problem is ongoing, the response has to be ongoing too.

What people in this space often get wrong is trying to solve food insecurity like a temporary emergency. That can be useful when someone has an immediate gap. It does not replace support that makes groceries easier to afford month after month.

Pay pressure is part of the story, even before groceries come up

Food insecurity does not sit alone. It shows up alongside other costs that are already eating into take-home pay.

KFF’s 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey says annual premiums for employer-sponsored family health coverage reached $26,993 in 2025, up 6% from 2024. Workers paid $6,850 toward those premiums out of their paychecks, on average. KFF also reports an average deductible of $1,886 for single coverage among covered workers in plans with a general annual deductible.

Those figures are not about food, but they help explain why food insecurity keeps showing up in employed households. When health costs take a larger share of wages, groceries get squeezed. Employers who want to help workers eat need to look at the whole budget workers are managing, not just the grocery bill.

Benefits that look generous on paper can still miss the point

The 2025 SHRM Employee Benefits Survey shows that employers are already using benefits to respond to worker needs across a wide range of organizations. That tells you the question is not whether employers should do something. They already are.

The harder question is whether the benefit matches the problem.

A food benefit that is hard to find, awkward to use, or too narrow to help with normal grocery shopping will not go far. Neither will support that assumes every worker shops, cooks, and schedules meals the same way. Families have different work hours, commuting patterns, and home routines. If the benefit only fits one kind of household, it leaves out a lot of the people who need it.

That is where many employer efforts fall short. They try to prove concern instead of making the next grocery trip easier.

What to do instead: make support steady, simple, and usable

If you are deciding how to respond, start with the question of use, not optics.

Support should be easy to understand, easy to access, and available often enough to matter. It should help with real grocery needs, not just special cases. It should also fit into the rest of the benefits workers already have, since food insecurity is happening alongside rising health costs and other household pressure.

That means a few practical tests:

• Can a worker use it without asking for help from HR every time?
• Does it work for ordinary grocery spending, not just a narrow set of purchases?
• Does it help over time, not only in a one-time emergency?
• Would a worker with a full-time job still find it useful if their budget is tight for months, not days?

If the answer to those questions is no, the benefit is probably too small or too hard to use to change much.

The decision employers should make now

Employers do not need to treat food insecurity like a one-off charity project. They need to treat it like a steady budget problem that affects working households.

That changes the job. Instead of asking what sounds supportive, ask what actually helps someone get groceries home this week and next month. Instead of building a benefit around a moment, build it around repeated use. And if you are trying to design support that people will actually rely on, tools that help families plan meals around a tight budget, like Platter, may fit into that picture too.

The right move is to choose support that workers can use as part of normal life, not as a special exception.