During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools closed abruptly and millions of families suddenly found themselves juggling remote work, job losses, and empty refrigerators, federal nutrition programs became one of the few reliable safety nets left. In Minnesota, the Department of Education oversaw programs designed to ensure that children who had depended on school breakfasts and lunches could still get meals even while stuck at home. It was, on paper at least, the government at its most human: a way to keep kids fed in the middle of a public health catastrophe. But according to state authorities, some people looked at that safety net and saw a cash machine. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has filed two civil lawsuits alleging that a Minneapolis bakery, a now-defunct nonprofit, a group of food vendors, and several individuals orchestrated schemes to submit false meal-claim paperwork to the state, pocketing millions of dollars that were supposed to reimburse legitimate efforts to feed children. The cases are stunning not just because of the dollar amounts, but because of the accusation: that in a moment of collective vulnerability, some adults were willing to exploit a program for children’s meals for private gain. Behind the legal jargon and spreadsheets and bank records are real kids, real hunger, and real trust that was broken.
The first lawsuit targets Nasib Bakery, a Minneapolis business that served as a vendor for a Summer Food Service Program site called Riverside Park from October 2020 through April 2021. The Summer Food Service Program is a federally funded initiative that reimburses qualified sponsors for meals served to children in low-income areas, typically during the summer months but more broadly during the pandemic because of emergency waivers. According to the lawsuit, the bakery’s owner also ran the site, creating an obvious conflict of interest: the same person was essentially both the operator requesting reimbursement and the vendor getting paid. Over those six months, the site claimed to have served more than 430,000 breakfasts and 430,000 lunches, or more than 860,000 meals in all. That would mean preparing and distributing nearly 5,000 meals a day, every single day, including weekends and holidays, from a single site in the middle of a global health emergency. The lawsuit states bluntly that “records show that many of these claims were false and many of the meals claimed were never served.” Investigators also discovered that more than $1 million in federal reimbursements ended up in the bakery owner’s personal bank account. The picture painted by the attorney general is not one of a struggling local business trying to help its community. It is one of a small operation that allegedly turned pandemic meal relief into an elaborate invoicing scheme, at a time when families across the state were scared and hungry.
The second case is even broader and more complex. It names East African Healthcare Network, a nonprofit described by the attorney general as one of the largest organizations responsible for distributing food to Minnesota children through federal programs during the pandemic, along with three food vendors and six individual defendants. The nonprofit is now defunct, but between 2020 and 2022 it operated more than a dozen food distribution sites across the state. In court filings, Ellison alleges that EAHN claimed to have served millions of meals and snacks to children under the Summer Food Service Program. To make that work, it contracted with the three vendors, who were supposed to purchase, prepare, and deliver meals that complied with federal nutrition requirements. According to the lawsuit, the organization and its vendors received over $10 million in meal-claim reimbursements from federally funded nutrition programs. But rather than a success story about a community organization stepping up during the pandemic, the state’s complaint describes a coordinated effort to defraud the system. The defendants are accused of working together to submit false claims, or causing false claims to be submitted, to the Minnesota Department of Education, and then falsifying records to cover their tracks. This is serious, deliberate, and premeditated behavior, not a matter of a few clerical errors. It suggests the defendants understood the reimbursement system well enough to manipulate it, inventing meals that were never served and fabricating documentation to make those inventions look legitimate.
These two lawsuits are not isolated explosions. Both are tied to Partners In Nutrition, a child nutrition sponsor that Ellison sued a month earlier. Sponsors are the middle layer in the federal meal program: they don’t necessarily cook the food themselves, but they oversee numbers of sites, collect data, and submit reimbursement requests to the state. Partners In Nutrition played that role for a network of sites, which made it a central clearinghouse for federal dollars. According to the state, that organization also submitted false claims, and a pending settlement would dissolve it and require the return of $18.5 million in public funds. The new lawsuits reach beyond the sponsor to the vendors and operators who were allegedly doing the day-to-day work of inflating meal counts and shredding trust. Ellison has made clear that the investigation is far from over. “We’re doing what we have legal jurisdiction to do,” he said. “We’re not nearly done. We think we’ll find more information.” That warning is a reminder that the two cases are not the end of the story, just the latest development in what appears to be a large-scale pattern of pandemic era fraud. The fact that so much money flowed through a single sponsor makes it easier to understand how the fraud may have spread: once the gatekeeper stops asking questions, or becomes part of the scheme, the floodgates open.
The lawsuits are not just demanding the money back; they are demanding consequences. Ellison’s office is seeking treble damages, meaning a court could triple the amount of actual damages, along with civil penalties for every false claim submitted. The office is also asking for injunctive relief to prevent the defendants from continuing to participate in state and federal food programs, and for recovery of the attorney general’s own costs and attorney fees incurred during the investigation and litigation. These are powerful tools, designed to punish wrongdoing and deter anyone else who might be tempted to turn public charity into private profit. Ellison has been characteristically direct about the message. “If you steal from Minnesotans, it may take a while, but we’re going to get you, we’re going to get our money back, and we’re going to hold you accountable,” he told WCCO. The phrase “it may take a while” is important. These investigations are slow, complicated, and painstaking. They require following paper trails that people tried to hide, tracing bank accounts, interviewing witnesses, and reconstructing events that unfolded during the chaos of a pandemic. But slow does not mean weak. The state is clearly methodically building its case, and these lawsuits show that the attorney general’s office will keep pushing even after the emergency has faded.
None of this comes with a happy ending for the children who never received those meals. Even if every dollar is recovered, the meals will never be served. That is the tragedy at the heart of these cases. Federal child nutrition programs rely on honesty, because they are so massive and operate in so many communities that no one can audit every single lunchbox. They depend on sponsors, vendors, and site managers to do the right thing. When those people don’t, it harms not only taxpayers but the families who trusted the system to be there for them. It also makes it harder for legitimate organizations to operate, because every scandal adds a new layer of suspicion and oversight to a system that was already stretched thin. The defendants in these cases deserve their day in court, and in the American legal system they are presumed innocent until proven otherwise. But the allegations tell a deeply human story about greed, desperation, and the fragility of public trust. The pandemic was hard for everyone, but it was especially cruel for low-income families who worried about where the next meal would come from. The idea that adults could exploit that fear for their own financial gain is profoundly ugly. Ellison’s twin lawsuits are an attempt to answer that ugliness with accountability. The money may have been stolen, the meals may be gone, but the state is still paying attention. And for everyone who watched the COVID-19 crisis reveal how much communities depend on child nutrition programs, that vigilance matters. It cannot undo the harm, but it can begin to repair the belief that public aid is meant to protect the most vulnerable, not to enrich those who are supposed to serve them.