The more I think about it, the more I convince myself that charitable food security benefits should not be distributed as a cash-equivalent.
Food stamps don't bring grocery stores into food deserts. And food stamps don't stop the corner store from charging $2/lb for bananas when a suburban grocery store is charging $0.60/lb for them.
If you pump more money into EBT/SNAP/WIC, the bananas go up to $3/lb, and the people still get fat while hungry. There's always a way for someone to siphon the value out of a cash entitlement benefit.
I think food security might be better served in the short term by using the funds to buy market baskets similar to those provided by farm shares, and deliver the food directly to the recipients, or at least to walkable distribution points. In the long term, the money has to be used to produce a surplus of food beyond what the cash market currently provides, to be put into a separate supply chain that is resistant to diversion or manipulation by middlemen.
This goes hand-in-hand with housing security, where the government builds new housing units, to rent or condo, then uses some percentage of them for housing-insecure people, at reduced cost to them. It doesn't do as much good to get a free (to you) 10# bag of government potatoes if you don't have anywhere to safely cook them.
You can't push a string. You can't pull sand.
Pumping more money into a community is not going to change anything when its defining characteristic is that the mechanisms to move money out are already limited by the amount of money left inside.