Who takes up a free lunch? Summer Food Service Program availability and household grocery food spending

Abstract

The Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) provides free meals to children in low-income neighborhoods as a summertime replacement for the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). Unlike the NSLP, the SFSP does not directly means test its recipients, and there are no large-scale administrative data describing the children it serves. I provide the first descriptive evidence of how SFSP site availability and meal provision varies across states and correlates with area demographics. I find that there is a positive relationship between an area’s likely need and SFSP availability, but availability plateaus before reaching full coverage in the highest poverty areas. As a second-best measure of household take up of the SFSP, I link these data to transaction-level records on household grocery expenditures and study the effect of SFSP availability on households’ grocery food spending. I use variation in the timing and intensity of SFSP meal provision to show that, under some assumptions, households with children reduce weekly grocery food spending by 1.8 percent for each additional meal received. These spending reductions are driven by households who are ineligible for subsidized meals during the academic year, providing suggestive evidence of targeting inefficiencies in the SFSP.