Every Saturday from June to October, Salt Lake City’s Downtown Farmers Market at Pioneer Park brings a bustling hive of shoppers eating, laughing and filling bags with produce and goods from vendors. In addition to cash, cards and Venmo, some people are using tokens to pay.
These tokens are part of food assistance programs like SNAP. Market leaders say ever since the pandemic, the use of funds through EBT and Double Up Food Bucks, which allows customers to double their money when buying local produce up to $30, is way up.
According to data collected by the Downtown Farmers Market, consumer spending using food assistance programs tripled between 2019 and 2022, from $26,000 a season to over $79,000.
“I think that it would be hard to be against people accessing fresh local food. I think Double Up Food Bucks is a win, win, win,” said Carly Gillespie, deputy director of Urban Food Connections of Utah. “Our farmers are supportive of it. They are making money, these people [SNAP users] are customers that wouldn’t normally be at the market spending their money with these producers.”
She said that the rise is partly due to better access to food assistance through pandemic-era programs, though those ended in March.
And farmers believe many of the changes made to preserve food safety during the pandemic are why people keep returning to the market.
Scott Galen Smith, owner of Provo-based Smith Orchards, said his family farm has been selling produce at the market for over 15 years.
Since COVID, a plastic shield has guarded rows of cherries, apricots and plums. Smith said customers appreciate the shield that keeps people from touching or breathing on the produce.
“I've had a lot of people say they like that idea,” Smith said. “That disturbs me a little bit, you know, if I end up buying something in a grocery store that it could've been handled a bunch of times.”
And some farmers reported business actually went up during the pandemic.
“Our sales went up, we had to increase our production. That's more people looking for products that [have] less handling, instead of the grocery stores,” said David Chen, owner of Zoe’s Natural Garden, another of the market’s vendors.
But even with growth from the pandemic, there are still areas for improvement. Gillespie said there is a drop-off in people attending the market in the fall, which is Utah’s peak harvest season. One thing that could help, she said, is better educating people on the seasonality of food. But she's optimistic.
“I do see more people coming to the farmer's market,” Gillespie said. “I think that this next generation coming into adulthood thinks a lot more about the impact of the decisions that they're making, whether that's environmental - or caring more with where their money is spent.”
