Food banks working in Food is Medicine often note the challenges of working with the healthcare industry, and vice versa.
One step toward bridging that gap came earlier this month when Feeding America and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics announced a standard to describe medically tailored groceries. The standard should help hunger relief and healthcare partners work together more confidently on Food is Medicine initiatives that prescribe healthy food to patients with chronic diet-related conditions.
The standard comes after food banks and healthcare providers have put in years of field work to determine the effectiveness of treating chronic diseases with nutritious food. Feeding America, for example, recently completed a three-year study of its work with the healthcare sector to screen more than 1.45 million patients for food insecurity and connect more than 161,000 households to nutritious food.
“This helps move things forward by providing an evidence-based standard that everybody can look to,” said Melanie Hall, Chief Health, Research and Evaluation Officer at Feeding America. “We are now moving forward with a little bit more alignment on what interventions look like.”
The new standard is rooted in the Healthy Eating Research guidelines, which were introduced in 2020 and now are widely used across the charitable food system to assess food quality (see our article here). Feeding America’s years of field research led it to focus on the three diseases most likely to respond to nutrition programming (diabetes, cardiovascular disease and hypertension). “We saw the best health outcomes when we had an intervention that was tailored specifically for a chronic disease, versus situations where we were just providing healthy food,” Hall noted.
The debut of the standard comes less than one month after Feeding America and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics announced a strategic partnership to advance Food is Medicine. Hall noted that work on the standard actually began years ago with Feeding America’s field work and accelerated in recent months with the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics helping with final reviews. According to Feeding America, 36 food banks and 14 registered dietitians provided input on the standard “through a structured, multi-month review process.”
The standard is not the only one to address medically tailored groceries. In April, the Food is Medicine Coalition announced that it was developing a standard for medically tailored groceries to be released in early 2027. Its standard will complement the medically tailored meals standard that it published in 2024 (see our article here). As with its medically tailored meals standard, the Coalition’s groceries standard is being developed with the help of a nonprofit called SCS Standards.
As the Coalition’s medically tailored groceries standard nears finalization, “we are reviewing Feeding America’s resource to better understand where our respective approaches align and differ,” said Alissa Wassung, Executive Director, in an emailed statement.
In addition to food, the Coalition’s existing medically tailored meals standard also covers eight other aspects of providing healthy meals, such as how patients are enrolled in the program, patient privacy and food safety. So far, 14 nonprofits have gone through the process of being accredited for meeting the Coalition’s medically tailored meal standard, according to its website.
Feeding America plans to add other elements to its just-released medically tailored groceries standard, such as nutrition education and implementation. It focused first on the food requirements because it knows from experience that obtaining the appropriate food is one of the biggest challenges for food banks doing medically tailored groceries.
Releasing the food portion of the medically tailored groceries standard first “gives the supply chain time to adapt to program needs,” said Feeding America in its standards document. It will work with the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics to flesh out other elements of the standard, like clinical care, “so we have that very full and complete guidance,” Hall said.
She added that the standard is “a very big and important step. We are trying to shift from being pulled into this space to intentionally articulating what our role is.” – Chris Costanzo
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