Forage Bets $40 Million That Affordability Is the Next Retail Network

Watch more: The Digital Shift With Forage’s Ofek Lavian

Today, 1 in 8 Americans receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Roughly 1 in 2 will qualify at some point in their lives. That is not a niche at the edge of grocery retail. That’s the mainstream, cycling in and out of eligibility as the economy tightens and loosens.

Forage is building for that consumer. Not the benefit, the consumer. And the distinction is the whole thesis behind the company’s recent $40 million Series B.

“We don’t view ourselves as an EBT point solution,” Forage CEO Ofek Lavian told Karen Webster. “We view ourselves as building a network for affordability.”

That framing is important, Lavian said. SNAP technology has spent most of its life in a narrow corner of payments, helping an eligible shopper finish a grocery order and nothing more. Forage is treating it as the first product in a much larger platform aimed at the households for whom stretching a food budget is the daily job to be done. The venture capital didn’t show up for benefit processing.

“Investors didn’t just want to modernize SNAP benefits,” Webster said. “They’ve obviously invested because they think there’s a much bigger business here.”

Lavian said the bigger business is affordability itself, delivered to a population that most retail infrastructure was never designed to serve well.

For merchants, that changes what SNAP acceptance is. It stops being a compliance checkbox at the register and becomes part of how a store wins and keeps a price-conscious shopper. Lavian’s data finds that as benefit dollars run short each month, consumers shop more selectively, compare promotions across merchants and gravitate to retailers that make a tight budget go further.

Asked whether merchants should treat SNAP as customer acquisition or customer retention, Lavian said the question sets up a false choice.

“I think it’s both,” he said. “If you aren’t catering to this consumer, that customer’s not coming back to shop in your store.”

Webster connected that to broader consumer behavior, pointing to PYMNTS research showing lower-income consumers frequently embrace online grocery because digital channels let them compare prices across retailers without added transportation cost. For this shopper, the ability to hunt for a lower price has become as valuable as the convenience of ordering online.

That insight is in Forage’s founding DNA. Before starting the company, Lavian built payments technology at Uber, then led payments and commerce work at Instacart, where he helped bring SNAP acceptance to online grocery. The experience convinced him that most assumptions about benefit recipients simply do not match how these consumers actually shop, or the obstacles they face getting to a store at all.

Affordability Is the Network. SNAP Is the On-Ramp.

The assumptions Lavian wants to overturn are practical ones. Today, 1 in 3 SNAP recipients live in a food desert, where the nearest full-service grocery store can be miles away, and 1 in 5 live with a disability. Many depend on public transit or gig work, which turns a trip across town to a second or third store into a real economic cost.

“Being able to shop online with Instacart or with any one of our partners,” Lavian said, “actually resonates even more than it might for other demographics.”

That means the network reaches in two directions at once. On the merchant side, Forage connects retailers to more than 40 million benefit recipients. On the consumer side, it’s building tools that help those households manage money the program alone never addresses. The new capital funds both.

“We’re going to be more ambitious than we’ve ever been before,” Lavian told Webster.

On the consumer side, the company recently launched an app that lets users track benefit balances and surface savings opportunities. The need is acute and predictable.

“The average EBT family of four gets over $700 of EBT benefits a month,” Lavian said. “Those benefits are mostly depleted by the second half of the month.” When the benefit dollars run out, the affordability problem does not. Households keep searching for ways to cover groceries until the next cycle begins, and that back half of the month is exactly where an affordability network earns its keep.

On the infrastructure side, Forage is widening the rails that handle restricted payments. Beyond SNAP, it has moved into Health Savings Accounts and Flexible Spending Accounts and is building support for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) benefits. The programs serve different purposes, but they share the hard parts. Product eligibility, compliance, and transaction routing. Solve those once and every new program extends the same network to the same consumers.

Lavian is blunt about the standard that network should hold itself to, starting with fraud.

“We shouldn’t be tolerant of any level of fraud in EBT,” he said. “The total number of dollars that are stolen by bad actors from vulnerable American families should be zero.” The fraud prevention that is routine in traditional card payments, he argued, should be standard across government benefit programs, because the families being stolen from are the ones who can least absorb the loss.

Watch the Interview

Watch Karen Webster’s full conversation with Forage CEO Ofek Lavian for more on:

Why investors see affordability infrastructure as a far larger business than EBT processing.

How Forage’s network connects merchants with more than 40 million benefit recipients.

Why online grocery matters most for consumers in food deserts or balancing multiple jobs.

How expanding into WIC, HSA and FSA could reshape the future of restricted payments.