Gem City Market board hopes meeting with state leads to resumption of WIC program

DAYTON — Problems with food supply as well as technology led the operators of Gem City Market to stop accepting WIC vouchers, at least temporarily.

A meeting between store board members and state WIC program representatives is planned for Thursday.

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The market stopped accepting WIC vouchers about two weeks ago.

News Center 7 reported on the stoppage and began looking into trying to find out why the vouchers were no longer being accepted from the federal program created to help women, infants and children.

The market’s goal has been to help the underserved community by offering SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and WIC benefits. That goal was being met, until May.

“We started to have some pretty serious administrative problems both problems at the register with technology but also problems with our selection and getting enough of the right assortment for WIC from our wholesaler,” Lela Klein, a Gem City Market board member, told News Center 7′s Haley Kosik.

The technological and food supply issues persisted for months, Klein said.

“There was a period of time where we were giving milk away for free because we didn’t want to say no to folks in need, but we could not get the register to recognize the skews,” she said.

Mark Willis, director of the Hall Hunger Initiative, said, “[Gem City Market] came to us and talked about some problems with WIC. We brought some folks together and found out a lot of folks are being challenged with it.”

When attempts to get the issue resolved and the market losing money because food was being given away, the market stopped accepting the vouchers.

“They can’t stay in business like that,” Willis said. “Every grocery store functions on a really minimal profit margin and a new like Gem City Market has really thin margins.”

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The plan is to resume accepting the vouchers, which will help the market stay in business.

When the program will resume is the issue.

Said Klein: “We will have to work on both internal and external issues. So issues with our supply chain, we’ll have to sold internally. Issues with our register will work with the state to solve. We will state taking a break again as soon as we can properly administer it.”

Willis said the critical stakeholders want the issues with the voucher program resolved.

“We want to keep doing it, Gem City wants to, the community wants to, Public Health (Dayton and Montgomery County) wants to support it, but we’ve got to make sure that they get the reimbursements,” he said.

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