Trude recently received five-year grants from the National Institutes of Health and the American Diabetes Association.
Within six months’ time, Angela C. B. Trude, assistant professor in NYU Steinhardt’s Nutrition program and interim director of the PhD program, was awarded a total of $5.2 million to continue her research on the role online grocery services can play in helping families who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits purchase healthier foods.
Since 2019, SNAP has been a viable payment method for food at authorized online retailers; however, research showed that SNAP families who shopped online made fewer purchases of fruits, vegetables, and legumes. For years, Trude has been working to design and evaluate programs aimed at supporting healthy food purchases for low-income families. Findings from her prior research were published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior last year.
National Institutes of Health Grant
In fall 2025, Trude was awarded $3,600,000 from the National Institutes of Health for research on SNAP families in the Bronx with young children (ages 2–10). As part of the study, all families will get free online grocery service delivery through research partner Instacart for 12 weeks; they will also receive $5 in Instacart funds every week to minimize service tips and fees.
“The idea is to address barriers about food access,” says Trude. “We want to find out if these families didn’t have to pay for online grocery shopping fees, what would they get with the money that is available to them?”
In addition to lowering the potential financial barrier with free delivery, families will also be randomly assigned an additional incentive, such as a dollar-for-dollar match on healthy food purchases or a meal planner and automated shopping list pre-filled with healthy options to support healthy food selection.
The NIH study is currently conducting focus groups discussions within the community; recruitment for the study will begin this spring.
American Diabetes Association Accelerator Award
This month, Trude was also selected for the American Diabetes Association (ADA) Accelerator Award totaling $1,624,000. This five-year funding similarly targets leveraging online grocery shopping incentives to encourage healthier food purchases in SNAP families, but this time with the added outcome of preventing pre-type 2 diabetes in adolescents.
Trude and her team are recruiting 200 families who live below the federal poverty line in the Bronx and have an adolescent (ages 12–17) in the home who is at risk for type 2 diabetes.
In addition to caregiver shopping incentives used in the NIH study, this ADA study also includes an incentive option directed at the adolescents: participation in a youth-led advocacy group run by community college students.
“This youth-led advocacy group is different in this study compared to previous ones,” says Trude. “The youth leaders—local community college students—will be trained in nutrition and community health, and they will follow the online diabetes prevention program that has been tested and shown to be effective for preventing type 2 diabetes in various ages.”
If this study proves successful, we’ve already started conversations with Instacart about the possibility of a larger implementation of financial incentives for SNAP families all over the country...
Data will be collected throughout the study on each family’s food purchases (both online and offline), but also on health markers for the adolescents to track changes over the 12 weeks.
“We want to see if and how families’ food shopping shifted because of the intervention, as well as evaluate the health of the adolescents as one of the main outcomes,” says Trude.
After these NIH and ADA studies conclude, Trude and her team will be able to identify which interventions are not only most effective in influencing families’ purchases of fruits, vegetables, and legumes, but also which are less costly and the easiest to implement from a programmatic standpoint.
“We’re looking for data to support changes in both the private and public sector,” says Trude. “We’re focusing on SNAP families because of the potential for policy impact, but the possibility is also there to affect the retailers. If this study proves successful, we’ve already started conversations with Instacart about the possibility of a larger implementation of financial incentives for SNAP families all over the country, such as free delivery or doubling up the money spent on healthy foods through the platform.”
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