California Women, Infants and Children Program Redemption by County

The Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program is a federally-funded health and nutrition program that provides assistance to pregnant women, new mothers, infants and children under age five. WIC helps California families by providing food benefits to individual participants based on their nutritional need and risk assessment. The food benefits can be used to purchase healthy supplemental foods from about 4,000 WIC authorized vendor stores throughout the State. WIC also provides nutritional education, breastfeeding support, healthcare referrals and other community services. Participants must meet income guidelines and other criteria. Currently, 84 WIC agencies provide services monthly to approximately one million participants at over 500 sites in local communities throughout the State.

Prior to June 2019, WIC issued paper food instruments (FIs) to individual participants for purchasing supplemental, nutritious foods. Beginning in June 2019, California WIC began transitioning to a new food delivery system, replacing the FI delivery system with the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) system. California WIC completed this transition in March 2020. With the previous FI delivery system, participants were issued three or four paper FIs per month listing the foods that could be redeemed at authorized vendor stores. In order to take full advantage of their benefits in the FI delivery system, participants had to purchase all of the foods listed on a FI in a single transaction or lose that benefit. In contrast, in the EBT system a family’s benefits are combined and uploaded to one EBT card. Participants can use this card to purchase WIC foods as needed through the benefit expiry date without having to purchase foods that they don’t need yet and without risking losing their benefits.

The data files provided contain monthly and annual redemption information from the FI delivery system and the EBT system by the county in which WIC participants redeemed their food benefits. Because FIs are issued and redeemed at the participant level, the FI redemption data are presented with aggregation at the participant level (e.g., participant category). However, because EBT redemptions only occur at the family level, EBT data can only be presented with aggregation at the family level. Therefore, we provide two types of aggregated data:

1.  WIC Redemption by Vendor County by Participant Category contains the number of FIs redeemed, the dollar amount of FIs redeemed, and the count of unique individual participants, from 2010 to 2018. This data is no longer available beyond 2018 due to transitioning from the FI delivery system to the EBT system.

2. WIC Redemption by Vendor County with Family Counts contains data from before and after the EBT transition period (i.e., 2010 – present), and provides the count of unique families instead of participants. It comprises three parts:
    
    - Part A contains only FI redemption data from 2010 to 2018; 
    - Part B contains both the FI redemption data and the EBT redemption data for the EBT transition period that occurred in 2019 and 2020; 
    - Part C contains only EBT redemption data for 2021 and forward.

The dollar amount of redemptions and the number of families redeeming benefits are expected to vary from month to month. Many of these monthly variations can be attributed to the number of days and holidays in a month. Additionally, in June 2021 the federal government approved a Cash Value Benefits (CVB) expansion, which resulted in a large increase in monthly EBT redemption amounts. The initial CVB expansion was implemented in California from June 2021 to September 2021 and provided $35 per month for all non-infant participants, increased from $9 - $11. The CVB expansion was subsequently extended several times.  Effective October 1, 2023, CVB was set at new inflation-adjusted amounts where pregnant and postpartum individuals receive $47 per month, breastfeeding individuals receive $52 per month, individuals breastfeeding more than one infant receive $78 per month, and children ages 1-5 received $26 per month. 

To ensure WIC participant and vendor anonymity, the redemption data has been suppressed when number of WIC vendors were less than 3 or number of redeemed participants or families were less than 11. The suppressed cells are annotated as “–“.

Tags: california-department-of-public-health, cfh, food-expenditures, food-instrument, food-voucher, food-vouchers-redeemed, month-of-obligation, participants-redeeming-food-vouchers, wic
Organization: State of California