This month, nearly 1.4 million women, infants and children in California have greater access to the healthy foods provided through the state’s Women Infants and Children (WIC) Program.
In 2012, USDA notified the California Department of Public Health that it must continue a self-imposed moratorium on the authorization of stores to accept WIC. The moratorium was due to concerns related to the oversight of authorized WIC vendors in the state and rising costs.
The California Department of Public Health worked diligently with USDA to develop a plan to contain costs and improve program integrity. As part of the plan, the California WIC Program strengthened its requirements for vendor authorization to improve WIC participants’ access to healthy foods.
USDA has a long-standing history of working with WIC State agencies to ensure that resources and taxpayer dollars are being used to efficiently administer the program across the country. In addition to new vendor authorization criteria, California WIC has successfully implemented new competitive price criteria for authorization of stores, a new peer group system to assess how stores are performing relative to their peers, and maximum allowable reimbursement rates for the prices WIC will reimburse a vendor for the healthy supplemental foods provided to participants. As a result, food costs in the state’s program have decreased 12.5 percent since Fiscal Year 2012.
The moratorium was lifted in phases to allow California WIC to effectively manage the application process while USDA continued monitoring the state’s progress in implementing its program improvement plan. On June 1, 2014, California WIC began accepting applications for new store locations for stores that already had a master agreement in place. On September 15, 2014, California WIC began accepting applications from stores that met the state’s definition of a full-line grocery store. The final phase was lifted on Feb. 1 for all remaining stores.
For more than 40 years the WIC program has provided supplemental foods and nutrition services that are vital to the health and nutrition of vulnerable moms, infants, and young children. The program promotes and supports the establishment of successful, long-term breastfeeding; offers WIC participants a wide variety of foods including fruits and vegetables and whole grains for improved dietary quality; and gives WIC state agencies greater flexibility in prescribing food packages to accommodate the cultural food preferences of WIC participants.
