In fraud trial, St. Paul school official says meal reports from Feeding Our Future site don’t add up

As she sat in the witness stand and looked over the meal count forms for one of Feeding Our Future’s busiest food distribution sites, the head of child nutrition at one of Minnesota’s biggest school districts noticed too many things that didn’t add up.

Every box of Feeding Our Future’s forms was filled. There were no math errors. The site operated at almost 100% of capacity every single day, and the number of kids getting meals never varied by more than a handful.

Most perplexing, the same staff member counted the number of meals served each day, even on weekends, meaning that person never took a day off.

“That is very unrealistic,” said Stacy Koppen, who oversees child nutrition programs for St. Paul Public Schools, when questioned Thursday by federal prosecutors in the Feeding Our Future trial.

The meal forms, which were used to justify the payment of more than $5 million to a company controlled by defendant Salim Said, were simply too “immaculate,” Koppen told the jury.

On the fourth day of testimony in the criminal case involving Said and Feeding Our Future director Aimee Bock, jurors got a glimpse of what it takes to deliver thousands of meals to children every day.

The issue is at the heart of a criminal conspiracy that prosecutors claim led to the theft of $250 million in federal funds meant to cover the costs of feeding low-income children in Minnesota after school and during the summer.

For the first time Thursday, jurors learned that some of Bock’s employees were openly fretting about criminal behavior in the meals program at least a month before federal agents raided Feeding Our Future’s headquarters in January 2022, alerting the public to what prosecutors are calling one of the largest pandemic-related fraud case in the U.S.

“They strongly believe you are doing fraud and you are not answering their questions ... because no one questions the boss,” an employee said in a Dec. 14, 2021, email to Bock that prosecutors showed the jury.

The employee asked for a meeting to discuss her concerns, noting she refused to be a “follower.”

The email was sent a few days after one of three gatherings at Feeding Our Future’s headquarters in St. Anthony at which Bock told site operators like Said to stop “flaunting” their wealth because it would attract the wrong kind of attention, according to FBI agent Jared Kary, who testified that employees told him about the widely-attended session.

By that time, Said had already spent $700,000 in fraud proceeds on his Plymouth home, Kary testified. Said and his partners also had diverted $2.7 million in federal funds in 2021 to buy a corporate office in Minneapolis, Kary testified.

Kenneth Udoibok, Bock’s lawyer, told reporters that the meetings at Feeding Our Future’s headquarters in mid-December were held for “educational” purposes.

“It wasn’t necessarily triggered by” the employee who brought up the fraud concerns, Udoibok said, adding that Bock was unaware of Said’s personal expenditures.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reimburses schools and nonprofits for feeding kids, and “sponsors,” like Feeding Our Future, then pay their meal distribution sites, like Said’s.

Koppen said it is against federal rules to use any money left after paying all meal program expenses — such as food costs, labor and shipping — on personal items, such as cars or real estate.

“That money has to go back into the food program,” testified Koppen, who noted that St. Paul Public Schools usually comes close to “breaking even” on its costs, which totaled $33.4 million in 2020.

Typically, Koppen said, the district provides about 21,000 breakfasts and 29,000 lunches a day at its 60 sites — or about three times the volume of meals claimed to be served by Said’s two sites in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Koppen said it takes a small army to deliver all of that food. Her department has 325 employees, and seven refrigerated box trucks haul supplies to schools every day. Thirty people unload all of the groceries that come in each day and store it in a building that’s large enough to cover most of a football field.

During the pandemic, Koppen said the school delivered meals to families along its normal bus routes, an operation that required the use of 300 buses.

“It is part of a very complex system,” Koppen said.

On Thursday, jurors were shown surveillance footage of food deliveries at Said’s Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis. Instead of the large pallets used to move food at St. Paul Public Schools, a food company worker wheeled in a few dozen boxes on a hand truck.

At the same time, Safari workers loaded several SUVs with boxes of what looked like prepared meals. Said’s lawyer suggested the food was being delivered to Somali parents.

Kary was asked if the footage made him question his earlier testimony, in which he said it was impossible for Safari to serve nearly 6,000 meals per day as it claimed in many of its invoices.

“Not at all,” Kary said, describing the food deliveries as “small” compared to the amount of food needed to serve that many meals. “It is definitely a situation where volume matters.”

Jurors also saw video this week of the St. Paul deli used by Said’s company, ASA Limited. Kary, who also testified in a trial last year, noted that ASA claimed to have begun serving nearly 3,000 meals a day just two weeks after the corporation was formed in 2020.

Koppen said she often has to arrange food deliveries as much as a year in advance because the orders are so large.

In 2021, when documents show the deli was allegedly serving close to 3,000 meals per day, Kary counted an average of 23 people visiting the business.

Koppen testified that she doesn’t believe the deli had the capacity to serve thousands of meals.

“We have very large kitchens that serve about half of the meals we are talking about here,” Koppen testified, adding that those kitchens are larger than the deli used by ASA.

The trial, which could last a month, is the second one since charges were filed in 2022. Of 70 people charged, 34 have pleaded guilty and five were convicted by a jury last year while two were acquitted.