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Using food stamps now easier at commissaries

It’s now easier for commissary customers redeeming food stamps to use their Electronic Benefit Transfer cards — and they have more privacy, too, as all checkout lines now accept these cards just as they do any credit or debit card.

The new checkout system is dubbed the Commissary Advanced Resale Transaction System, or CARTS.

Previously, commissaries had to use stand-alone, state-provided systems to process the benefit cards, and the terminals were installed on only one or two registers. Food stamp benefits are not received overseas.

“On occasion, customers with food-stamp EBT cards found themselves in the wrong line, and we’d have to direct them to use one of the registers with an EBT terminal,” said Gary Hensley, director of the commissary at Fort Benning, Ga., in an announcement from the Defense Commissary Agency. The Fort Benning commissary rang up more than $1.1 million in purchases in the food stamp redemption program in 2007, tops among commissaries.

“Now, we take food stamp cards at every register, and customers waiting in line never know the customer in front of them used food stamps,” Hensley said.

Redeeming Women, Infants and Children’s program (WIC) benefits is still a manual process, because it relies on individual state requirements and agreements, according to Tony Collazo, chief of DeCA’s systems division. The goal is to someday process WIC using an EBT system, but that is down the road, he said.

WIC is a federal program providing grants to states for supplemental foods, health care referrals and nutrition education for low-income pregnant and postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age five who are determined to be at nutritional risk.

The WIC Overseas program, which parallels the stateside programs and is administered by the Defense Department, uses coupons called “drafts” for certain foods at checkout.