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Four states cut soda from SNAP today. A judge already threw out the same plan in five.

Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina and Virginia start their bans Nov. 1 while USDA appeals a ruling that it lacked the authority.

Four states cut soda from SNAP today. A judge already threw out the same plan in five.
Stock photo. Photo by Jacqueline Brandwayn on Unsplash

Starting today, Nov. 1, families in Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina and Virginia can no longer use SNAP benefits to buy soda and other sweetened drinks, and in the first three states candy is off the list too, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The four states join eight that already enforce similar bans, while a federal judge has thrown out the same kind of approval in five others.

SNAP, the federal food assistance program once called food stamps, is supposed to let families buy any "food" as Congress defined it. The Trump administration's Agriculture Department has been carving exceptions out of that definition state by state, at governors' request, and says it will keep pursuing the policy as part of its "Make America Healthy Again" agenda.

What changes at the register today

The rules differ by state, according to USDA's waiver list:

  • Montana: high-sugar drinks, energy drinks, candy and prepared desserts.
  • North Dakota: sweetened drinks, energy drinks and candy.
  • South Carolina: candy, energy drinks, soft drinks and sweetened drinks. Diet and zero-sugar sodas stay eligible, WTOC reported.
  • Virginia: carbonated sweetened drinks, including diet and "zero" sodas and carbonated energy drinks. Juice, milk, sports drinks, iced tea and lemonade remain eligible, the Virginia Department of Social Services says.

Benefit amounts don't change. A blocked item simply won't ring up on an EBT card, and shoppers can pay for it another way in the same transaction, Virginia's agency says. Households can't opt out. In South Carolina alone, the rules reach about 481,856 people in 235,235 households, based on June 2026 figures reported by WTOC.

Virginia's approval, signed Dec. 10, 2025 and addressed to then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin, runs two years with up to three one-year extensions, according to the USDA approval letter. It applies to every SNAP household in the state.

A judge said USDA skipped the rules

In June, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson vacated USDA's approvals for Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia in Aragon v. Rollins, a lawsuit brought by five SNAP recipients from those states. She found Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had no authority to waive "the very definition of 'food' as it was laid down by Congress," and that USDA skipped a required 30-day public notice in the Federal Register, the Tennessee Lookout reported. Officials "can take lawful steps" to improve SNAP households' health, she wrote, but "what they cannot do is violate the law and their own regulations along the way."

Rollins responded on X by calling Jackson "an activist judge," Grocery Dive reported. That attacks the judge, not her reasoning: the ruling rested on the text of the Food and Nutrition Act and on USDA's own notice regulation, and the judge wrote that her analysis was not "a comment on whether the pilot projects are a good idea or not." The government appealed to the D.C. Circuit in August, court records show.

The ruling covered only the five states where plaintiffs lived. Rather than drop the other plans, USDA asked South Carolina and North Dakota to push their start dates to Nov. 1 so it could take public comments first, Food Dive reported. Virginia's start date slipped too: its approval letter set April 1, and the state later listed Oct. 1 before landing on today.

Corner stores are walking away

The first hard data on the bans' side effects came out last month. A peer-reviewed study in Health Affairs Scholar by Benjamin Chrisinger of Tufts University and Justin White of Boston University found that after 10 states began restrictions in early 2026, the number of convenience stores accepting SNAP ran 1.4% below what trends in other states predicted. In states banning both drinks and candy, the drop averaged 2.2%. Supermarkets showed no clear decline.

The effect was sharpest in low-income areas where many residents use SNAP, the authors wrote in a summary republished by Tufts. They cautioned that they didn't study why stores left, and one sensitivity test widened the margin of error enough to include zero.

Who pays

Families who shop at the corner store because the nearest supermarket is a bus ride away lose the most if those stores stop taking EBT. We condemn USDA's decision to launch four more bans built on the same legal authority a federal judge has already rejected, before an appeals court has ruled.

Next up: Nebraska's restrictions are scheduled for Dec. 1, and Kansas, Missouri, Wyoming, Ohio and Hawaii follow in 2027, USDA's list shows. If you use SNAP in one of the four states, check your state agency's list of restricted items before you shop.

Sources

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