1 Cent - Food Stamp Scrip

USDA food stamp scrip was issued as fractional change currency within the Food Stamp Program — when a purchase totaled less than a full dollar in stamps, these small denominations were handed back as change rather than wasting a full coupon book page. The 1-cent denomination is the lowest in the series and saw heavy use at point of sale, which makes genuinely uncirculated examples surprisingly hard to find despite the program's relatively modern history.

The watermark was a deliberate fraud deterrent; counterfeiting food stamp scrip was a persistent federal enforcement problem throughout the program's operational decades before electronic benefit transfer replaced paper coupons entirely in the early 2000s.