Strategies

Buying Food

Create incentives for Minnesota businesses to pay all employees living wages.

Offer incentive programs for consumers, such as ‘market bucks’ and ‘veggie prescription’ programs for healthy food purchases at stores and farmers markets.

Establish healthy food programs and policies that give institutional food buyers greater purchasing power, so they have more resources to buy healthier food for meals, concessions, vending machines, and fundraisers.

If healthy food is widely available, the healthy choice is the easy choice, for all of us.

Selling Food

Streamline regulations so more farmers who sell food at farmers markets or elsewhere can accept WIC and SNAP/EBT.

Develop a ‘healthy food financing’ initiative that provides funding, incentives, low-cost financing, and tax breaks for healthy food-related enterprises (such as new food stores offering affordable, healthy options in communities that need them, or regionally-focused food distribution companies).

Develop institutional policies and practices to increase the price of unhealthy food and decrease the price of healthy foods.

Create incentives for institutional foodservices, stores, and farmers’ markets to purchase or sell affordable foods grown locally, sustainably, or organically.

Create incentives for Minnesota farmers to grow affordable, healthy food for nearby institutions.

Matching ‘food bucks’ programs can greatly increase healthy food consumption for low-income people and increase farmer profits.
Fair Food Foundation, 2014
The Minnesota Food Charter will ensure we have healthy, affordable and safe food, building a legacy of health for future generations.

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The Minnesota Food Charter Network is supported by the Center for Prevention at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, the Minnesota Department of Health, University of Minnesota Extension, and the General Mills Foundation. This material was funded in part by USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – SNAP – with funds received from and through the Minnesota Department of Human Services. USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer. The Minnesota Food Charter Network is hosted by the University of Minnesota’s Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives Institute.