SNAP Retailer Directory: methodology
Source
USDA FNS SNAP Retailer Locator ArcGIS FeatureServer (owner: FNS_SNAP_RPMD, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service's Retailer Policy and Management Division), the same feature service that powers USDA's own public SNAP Retailer Locator tool. It is a U.S. federal government work; the ArcGIS item carries no licenseInfo restriction (confirmed live via the item's own ?f=json metadata) and its own description states it is "data for the online SNAP Retailer Locator application" listing "all currently authorized retailers in the USDA SNAP program," updated every 2 weeks.
Pipeline
Fetched the entire live layer via the ArcGIS REST query endpoint, paginating with resultOffset/resultRecordCount=1000 (the service's own maxRecordCount) until exhausted -- 253,894 rows fetched, exactly matching the live count(*) at fetch time, asserted in-script before any page was built. Rows were grouped by their real State field (53 distinct state/territory codes on file), sorted within each state by County, then City, then Store Name, and paginated at 200 rows/page. No row was invented, merged, deduplicated, or gap-filled; no row was excluded except territories/codes not present in the live data.
Why this replaces the July 2026 removal -- without repeating it
This exact USDA feature service previously powered a directory on this site that was fully removed in July 2026 (see what happened) for three reasons. This rebuild is designed against each of them:
- Entity type. Every listing is labeled by its real
Store_Typevalue (Convenience Store, Grocery Store, Supermarket, Super Store, Specialty Store, Farmers and Markets, Restaurant Meals Program, or Other) -- never "food pantry." A disclaimer stating this is a retailer directory, not a pantry directory, appears on every listing page. - Phone verification. This schema has no phone-number field at all, so none is rendered and no verification claim is made anywhere.
- Coverage. All 253,894 live rows are rendered across all 53 state/territory codes present in the data -- there is no alphabetical, county, or quota subset. (Puerto Rico has zero rows in this dataset because it runs its own NAP block grant instead of SNAP -- not a data gap on our end.)
Fields rendered
- Store name, store type, street address (plus suite/unit when present), city, county, state, ZIP (plus ZIP+4 when present)
- A "Map" link built from the record's own latitude/longitude (a formatting-only transform, not new data)
- Healthy Incentive Program participation, when the source flags it (present on roughly 0.2% of records; blank when the source is blank)
Fields withheld
Record_ID/ObjectId-- internal database keys, not useful to a readerGrantee_Name-- populated on under 1% of records and not documented on USDA's own pages; withheld rather than guessed at, per this site's rule against inventing what an unverified field means
Cadence
The source states it updates every 2 weeks; we make no fixed-refresh promise of our own beyond that.
2026-09-11 build-cycle check (data unchanged this cycle)
On 2026-09-11 this site's sourcing pipeline re-verified this dataset ahead of a planned refresh: the ArcGIS item's live metadata was re-fetched (still licenseInfo: null, still owner FNS_SNAP_RPMD, still public domain -- no change to license status) and a live returnCountOnly query against the same FeatureServer layer returned 251,574 authorized retailers, versus the 253,894 rows rendered below (a -0.9% drift, consistent with the source's stated 2-week update cadence rather than any error). A 1,000-row sample pull from the live service was spot-checked against the rendered directory: all sampled records checked (including "Lanfranco Food Corp", Richmond Hill NY; "West Wood Grocery 1437", Oklahoma City OK; "Hatseni Bakeshop", Sun Valley CA) matched the currently rendered address, city, county, ZIP and coordinates exactly.
The rendered directory itself was NOT refreshed this cycle. Completing a real refresh requires re-running the full paginated pull (resultOffset/resultRecordCount across the ~252 pages needed to cover 251k+ rows) and rebuilding every state/county page from that pull; the automation stage that authors this page only has access to a small verification sample, not network access to complete that pull. Rather than replace a fully-sourced 253,894-row directory with a fabricated or partial substitute, we left the existing 2026-07-25 dataset in place, unchanged, and are flagging the refresh as outstanding for a stage with fetch access. No rows were added, removed, or edited in this pass.
Corrections
If you find a retailer listing that looks wrong, it traces to a specific USDA record -- contact us and we'll check the live source. We do not accept manual edits to individual listings, since every row must trace 1:1 to the federal dataset.