Giant Eagle launches food as medicine program
Giant Eagle launches food as medicine program
Giant Eagle has partnered with NationsBenefits, a leader in healthcare fintech and integrated benefit solutions. Eligible health-plan members can pay for fresh produce, pantry staples and over-the-counter wellness items at more than 200 Giant Eagle supermarkets, where item-level eligibility is validated at checkout in just milliseconds. The collaboration also further connects food as medicine benefits directly to where families shop, while giving health plans privacy-safe insights to refine program design and member outreach.
Food access and chronic-condition burdens remain a concern across Giant Eagle’s footprint, including western Pennsylvania, north-central Ohio, northern West Virginia, Maryland and Indiana. Regional indicators point to consistent needs: state food-insecurity rates sit in the low- to mid-teens (13.2 percent in Pennsylvania; 15.3 percent in Ohio, 2023), adult diabetes prevalence in parts of the region ranges from ~13 percent in Ohio to ~16.2 percent in West Virginia, and nationally 18.8 million people live in low-income, low-access census tracts.
Taken together, these dynamics reinforce why embedding benefits at familiar grocery stores can improve day-to-day access and convert routine shopping into stronger prevention and adherence. This approach is also consistent with recent evidence that food-related supplemental benefits are associated with higher odds of meeting preventive-care and chronic-condition management quality measures in Medicare Advantage.
“Giant Eagle is focused on expanding access to fresh, high-quality foods in the neighborhoods we serve,” said Mike Chappell, senior vice president of pharmacy at Giant Eagle. “Partnering with NationsBenefits allows eligible shoppers to use their health benefits seamlessly for the items that matter most to their families, while maintaining a frictionless, trusted checkout experience across all of our supermarkets.”
Embedding benefits at the checkout turns an ordinary grocery run into a powerful driver of prevention. The Giant Eagle integration extends NationsBenefits’ growing retail network and unified benefits and payments platform, ensuring nutrition, OTC and other benefits flow through the same real-time validation and transparent reporting that plans and members can rely on.
