Last spring, the Legislature passed and the Governor signed House Bill 1056 to ban low-income South Dakotans from using their SNAP benefits to buy pop and other soft drinks. South Dakota’s Department of Social Services has asked the feds for permission to implement this exclusion.
South Dakota Retailers’ exec Nathan Sanderson questions the implementation of this SNAP pop ban:
“What exactly constitutes a soft drink is difficult to know. Is orange juice a soft drink? Well, orange juice has a higher sugar content than a lot of products that one might think would be ‘soft drinks,’” Sanderson said [Grant Green, “SNAP Waiver Banning Soft Drinks a Possible Administrative Burden for the State,” KSFY, 2026.09.04].
HB 1056 defines “soft drink” as “a nonalcoholic beverage that contains natural or artificial sweeteners.” HB 1056 exempts “milk or milk products; rice, soy, or similar milk substitutes; [and] juices that have been approved by the Department of Health for eligibility in the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children.” DOH’s WIC juice list includes orange juice of any brand but disallows, among other juices, organic juices or juices in glass bottles.
HB 1056 thus appears to answer Sanderson’s question: orange juice is fine, as long as it comes in a carton or plastic jug and isn’t labeled “organic”.
HB 1056 prime sponsor Rep. Taylor Rehfeldt (R-14/Sioux Falls) says banning SNAP for soft drinks “is about making sure taxpayer-funded programs encourage healthier choices and better outcomes for South Dakota families.” I’m not sure drinking regular Land O’ Lakes orange juice from a plastic jug is a healthier choice than drinking organic O.J. from a glass bottle. And if you’re trying not to fill your body or your kids’ growing bodies with sugar, you’ll get more sugar from LOL O.J. (26 grams per 8-ounce serving…and hey, why do our official nutrition labels mix metric and imperial measurements?) than from Sunny Delight (20g per 8 oz).
Sanderson also frets that his retailers are going to face administrative costs and guff from customers:
“There 100% will be impacts; you’re going to have to figure out how to make this all work, and that’s not even counting the pushback they’re (Retail stores) going to get from consumers who are going to want to know why the product they were able to purchase last week isn’t able to be purchased this week, and so on,” Sanderson said [Green, 2026.09.04].
The state will also incur ongoing administrative costs:
An estimate prepared by the Legislative Research Council said hiring the staff and paying for the software necessary to implement a ban would cost the state $310,000 in the first two years, and about a quarter-million dollars annually thereafter [Makenzie Huber, “South Dakota Seeks to Ban Use of Food Assistance for Soda Purchases as Court Ruling Clouds Issue,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2026.08.31].
South Dakotans can still swipe their EBT cards for Sunny Delight, 7-UP, and other sweetened beverages. HB 1056’s ban won’t take effect until six months after the feds approve the state’s waiver request. And it might never take effect, since a federal judge blocked five other states from implementing similar SNAP-pop bans earlier this summer:
“Congress defined what ‘food’ is supposed to be, and it did not authorize the agency to amend or waive the definition it enacted. It did not authorize the agency to cut types of food out of SNAP entirely,” U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote in a Monday filing, referencing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
“It set out clearly the type of experimental projects that could be tested to address the unquestionably serious health issues attributed to the rise of obesity in the population in general and particularly the low-income population,” she added.
According to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia filing, five states, including Iowa, Nebraska, West Virginia, Colorado and Tennessee, “submitted requests to the USDA to conduct pilot projects” between April and August 2025 attempting to “waive the federal definition of ‘food,’” removing certain items from that definition including soft drinks and soda.
Is the juice worth the squeeze on retailers and the state budget? A working paper from profs from Stanford, MIT, and U. Chicago suggests states that have banned SNAP for sugary drinks have reduced SNAP households’ purchases of the targeted drinks by 12.4%. But until the courts or Congress say otherwise, we won’t be able to test that theory in South Dakota.
Related Refreshments:
- The Department of Health does not allow WIC to pay for vegetable juice. Old Orchard Juicy Juice is o.k., but Original V8 is out.
- The DSS waiver request says SNAP supports about 72,000 South Dakotans in 36,500 households. In FY2026, those South Dakotans spent $175.9 million in SNAP benefits in 4.7 million transactions at 804 retail establishments.
The real problem is our convoluted pricing that prices milk 2 1/2 times higher than soft drinks. In general, high sugar, high caloric, high processed foods are cheaper than healthier counterparts.
Want to encourage nutritional choices? Set prices on what you want to encourage SNAP users to purchase. (Stop subsidizing high fructose corn syrup.) A dollar only stretches so far.
Forget orange juice. Eat oranges. It’s the fiber that’s healthy not the sweet taste.
This bill should be repealed. It’s good to emphasize good nutrition, but this is not the way you do that. People often make the decision to buy the cheapest food, especially in inflationary times. I know I did when I was a poor student. Instead provide all South Dakotans with educational information on the sugars and other additives added to products. Then untax the good choices and increase the tax on the sugary products.
Republicans like to regulate, its what they do. With SNAP its easy. The problem with SNAP is its used by poor people in poor districts that have dollar stores with cheap unhealthy food.
You know I point out to my wife that a can of beer is much cheaper than a can of kombucha but I can never win that argument either.
If grocery stores were health centers, only most of the perimeter and a tiny fraction of the interior would be all that’s left.
How is this not a slippery slope to discrimination? What about coffee, tea and condoms? Are they verboten for EBT?
People blow their food stamps on crap and then they go to food pantries
And what I have learned from the lovely women who work in the food pantries is that their clientele have no idea what to do with raw foods
Raw foods like chicken, turkey, pork, beef.
We used to hear how hunters could donate excess game “to the poor.”
The poor don’t know what to do with it.
Other food pantry workers say their clientele don’t know how to open cans, or rather, they don’t know how to keep track of the can openers they are given.
Every week they need a new can opener. So donors are advised to donate cans with pop tops
Soft drinks come with pop tops
Somehow we have a generation of Anericans who can’t cook meat or open cans.
We’re doomed
Republican is not just another word for Earth hater; it’s another word for misanthrope.
OF COURSE if you’re poor you head for the cheap stuff. With ground beef running between $5.99 (heavy fat) to $7.22 a pound (leaner), not to mention the cost of buns, ketchup, mustard, salt, pepper, a bag of potatoes and the oil to fry them in (or the milk to mash them with), it can be cheaper to go to McDonald’s for a family of four than to buy the raw stuff and cook it up. And at least the napkins come with the meal.
“Other food pantry workers say their clientele don’t know how to open cans, or rather, they don’t know how to keep track of the can openers they are given.” – Frankly, and I’ve worked at a food pantry, I’ve never heard this one before in my life. Are you sure you weren’t just being told a story by some irate snob in line at the grocery store?
Meanwhile, I’ll go for cutting sodas, cookies and candy from SNAP benefits whenever someone decides that the rich cannot deduct yachts, private planes, and second homes from their taxes.
It’s dehumanizing enough having to rely on food pantries to not starve. If you’re lucky enough to be so poor you also get SNAP and someone else gets to decide what you get permission to drink or eat is horrible. I’m sure some people exploit the system, but ask an aging boomer how it feels to have worked their entire adult life, is single, disabled and living off ssi.
Eve make a great point, if it is time to make moral decisions about how government handouts are used, I would prefer to start at the top of the food chain – not the poor.
Thanks, O.
I have been on food stamps twice in my life, NEVER wasted them on crap. We ate a lot of beans and rice.
But then, I knew how to cook beans and rice
I had a cookbook titled “Diet for a Small Planet.”
It should be required reading in high school.
My other favorite book is titled “Putting Food By.” It explains how to preserve your excess garden produce for the winter, if you ever learned how to grow your own.
The allotments provided under the food stamp program were more than adequate to feed the family. as long as I didn’t use them to buy chips and pop. And I never bought chips and pop. I never even bought cold breakfast cereals.
About 30 years ago I was in a HyVee parking lot and two women had set up a table and chairs and were collecting signatures for some kind of petition protesting the high cost of breakfast cereals. They saw me with my kids and thought surely I would agree with them.
I agreed with them that the cereals were overpriced but explained that was the reason I never bought them. They looked at me like I had two heads.
A generation which has never been taught how to prepare food is doomed to a diet of garbage.
Nutrition and food prep should be part of public education curriculum.