Food insecurity among families with children has increased in recent years. According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), 17.3 percent of US households with children experienced food insecurity in 2022. At the same time, these families can face added barriers in accessing supports that could help meet their food needs.

For many families with low incomes, unpredictable work schedules, a lack of child care options, and a lack of access to transportation can make it difficult to pick up charitable food—or free groceries or meals—at local food banks or other nonprofit organizations. These same barriers can prevent children and families from accessing government-funded food assistance programs that require meals to be consumed on site.

Recent research from the Urban Institute evaluating Project DASH, a charitable food delivery partnership, and Meals-to-You, a summer meal program that delivered food directly to families, shows how home delivery could help reduce food insecurity and food access barriers among families with children. To connect more families to food assistance, policymakers should consider increasing funding for home delivery programs and making existing programs more flexible.

Families with children can face multiple barriers to accessing in-person food assistance

Programs that deliver food directly to families with children could help address four key food access barriers:

1. Unpredictable work hours. Many caregivers with low incomes have multiple jobs or work nontraditional hours that they must balance with their family’s child care needs. This can make it difficult for families to pick up free meals and groceries in person, as distribution sites are often only open a few hours per week or month.
2. Lack of time. Families with low incomes can face increased time constraints because they are unable to access time-saving goods and services that families with higher incomes use to cope with competing demands. This can limit their ability to learn about and access benefits, as well as travel to charitable and government food assistance sites.
3. Unreliable and shared transportation. Balancing child care and work obligations can be especially difficult for families with low incomes (PDF) who share vehicles or struggle to afford reliable transportation. Relying on public transportation to reach food assistance sites can also be challenging and time-consuming if transfers are required or local transit is unreliable.
4. Increased care responsibilities. For example, postpartum mothers and caregivers of children with disabilities may be unable to travel for charitable or public food assistance because of their added caregiving responsibilities at home.

Home delivery removed food access barriers for households with children

Recent research from the Urban Institute shows how home delivery of charitable food and public food assistance could help alleviate the food access barriers families with children face.

In our evaluation of Project DASH—a partnership between DoorDash and more than 300 nonprofit antihunger organizations to deliver free groceries directly to families in need—we found that home delivery removed food access barriers for households with children. Out of the 67 households with children surveyed, almost all of them reported that receiving home delivery through Project DASH helped them save money on groceries, extend their household budget, and stretch their public benefits.

Further, only 33 percent of families with children reported that they had received charitable food before participating in Project DASH. This finding suggests that home delivery could help address the barriers families with low incomes face in accessing charitable food in person. In addition, bundling charitable food delivery with other essential services, such as diaper delivery or home visiting programs, could alleviate food access barriers among postpartum mothers and other hard-to-reach populations.

Home delivery could also help connect more families with low incomes with publicly funded summer meal programs. In the summer, food insecurity rates often spike among children who receive free breakfast and lunch during the school year. However, many families, especially those who live in rural areas, struggle to access in-person summer meal programs, which provide free meals to children at community sites such as schools.

In our evaluation of a pilot program funded by the USDA, we found that rural families preferred more flexible summer meal options, such as home delivery. The program, known as Meals-to-You, delivered boxes of shelf-stable food to children in rural and remote communities who lack access to in-person summer meal sites. We found that Meals-to-You also reduced food insecurity and severe food hardship, especially among families who received more meals. This suggests that home delivery could help more families with children, who are more likely to be food insecure, meet their food needs.

How to expand home delivery options for families with children

Both public and charitable food assistance programs could reach more food insecure families by delivering food directly to their homes. We offer the following strategies to make existing food assistance programs more flexible and help them reach more families in need:

1. Help more states set up summer meal delivery through the Summer Food Service Program by providing states with more logistical guidance and funding. In 2023, the USDA expanded the Summer Food Service Program and granted states the flexibility to deliver summer meals to help increase food access among children in rural and remote areas. Policymakers and the USDA could help more states take advantage of this flexibility by providing them with more guidance on home delivery logistics and partners that could help them offer home delivery options.
2. Consider subsidizing online grocery ordering and delivery for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants. Though SNAP participants can use Electronic Benefits Transfer cards to pay for groceries ordered online through select retailers, they cannot use their benefits to cover the cost of associated service or delivery fees. Subsidizing these fees could increase access to home delivery and help more people navigating complex food access barriers—such as caretakers of children with disabilities or postpartum mothers—access the assistance their families need.
3. Allow charitable food organizations to use federal funds to provide home delivery to households with children. Policymakers could help charitable food organizations offer and expand home delivery to underserved groups by both increasing administrative funding for the Emergency Food Assistance Program and other federal programs that could be put toward expanding delivery capacity and adding program flexibilities.