Modernizing an 85 billion dollar industry - Snappier
Project Information
Market
Food assistance programs alone transacts more than 85 billion dollars in every year. Today food assistance is delivered, to those who need the most, trought FDA approved debit cards. However, transactions most of the time rely in very rudimentary off-line solutions.
Opportunity
Farmers markets allow consumers direct access to inexpensive fresh produce sustaining local economies and benefiting consumers with a healthy diet. In the USA XX% of total transactions under these food assistance programs are placed in farmers markets.
The Challenge
Transacting inside farmers market usually involves off-line systems such as wooden tokens or coupons to be exchanged for products inside the market. Each market hast to mint their own pre-approved tokens to allow food assistance consumers to acquire them with program money to then pay local farmers when purchasing goods inside the market.
Some challenges of wooden tokens are:
- There is a fixed stock of wooden tokens at a given time, meaning that an overflow of demand will be unstatisfied
- Wooden tokens can be lost or stolen
- Wooden tokens can only be used in the market where they were minted
- Wooden tokens make reconciliation between farmers and markets complicated
- Tokesn or coupons are phisical elements that can help disease to spread