At the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market, Jessica waits in line. She is slouched forward in the characteristic fentanyl fold, supporting her weight by leaning heavily on a wire pushcart. At the front of the line, she produces her Calfresh EBT card. The farmers’ market clerk charges her card $30 and gives her paper vouchers — $30 in regular SNAP vouchers valid at the farmers’ market, plus an extra $60 in vouchers from Market Match, a program that describes itself as “California’s healthy food incentive program.” Ostensibly, this program subsidizes low-income recipients’ purchases of fruits and vegetables.
However, Jessica — wearing a puffy jacket and pajama pants, looking like she’s in her 50s but probably younger — is not here to buy fruits and vegetables. Instead of going to a farmers’ market stall, she takes them to a nearby group of older Cantonese women, their faces concealed behind surgical masks and sunhats, hovering a few yards away. Jessica gives her vouchers to one of these women, who counts the $90 in vouchers and gives Jessica $50 in clean green bills. Cash in hand, Jessica departs. The purchased vouchers are then turned in to the farmers’ market organizers, and reimbursed by check as though they had actually been received in legitimate transactions. The whole transaction takes place in clear view, only a few yards from the Market Match tent and the security guard.
Jessica is a composite character, not a real individual, representative of the many people we observed and interviewed who sell their SNAP vouchers. It’s easy to guess what they do with the cash. Multiple fentanyl addicts confirmed to us that they regularly get their drugs by selling SNAP at the farmer’s market. “If you want to buy drugs and not food, you can do it,” says one. We asked another addict if he buys snacks with the cash. “No. I buy dope, man.”
Transactions such as these were once extremely common, done in full view and with full knowledge of the market’s staff and security. Since March, when the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market learned of our investigation, their security guards now shoo away the professional buyers and the vagrants who are caught selling to them. The rate of these sales has fallen dramatically. The line to buy vouchers at the Market Match tent, which before would sometimes stretch around the block, is now substantially shorter and often completely absent.
Where does the money for these vouchers come from? One third of Jessica’s $90 comes from the United States Department of Agriculture via Calfresh, California’s name for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that operates within the state. Another $30 also comes from the USDA but through a more complicated route; the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program directs the USDA to allocate money to individual states, which California then gives to the Ecology Center, a Berkeley-based nonprofit that runs the statewide Market Match program, and the Ecology Center gives the money to the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market. The final $30 is only intermittently available. This is funded by the San Francisco Sugary Drinks Advisory Committee, which distributes roughly $11 million annually collected from San Francisco’s tax on soda. The committee, and sometimes other donors, intermittently provide funds to the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market, which is given as vouchers to Market Match recipients — many of whom immediately sell them for cash and often fentanyl — until the money runs out.
As of 2024, the Ecology Center’s Market Match program reimbursed $1.7 million to the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market, and $10.7 million to farmers’ markets throughout California. Since these were matching funds, we can presume Calfresh also reimbursed the same $10.7 million to California farmers’ markets including $1.7 million to Heart of the City. The sums are probably larger today. In addition, the San Francisco Sugary Drinks Advisory Committee provided $500,000 to the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market in the 2024–25 fiscal year. Much of this funding is legitimately used for buying food from farmers’ markets. However, the brazenness and scale of the fraud — enough to support multiple dedicated SNAP buyers who wait at the Market Match tent — suggests that a large fraction went to fraud.
Given all this evidence, we investigated public funding (money flowing into Market Match) and vendor check redemptions (money flowing out). Under the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance, we requested records from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, who said they had none and referred us to the Human Services Agency; then to HSA, who also said they had no records. Finally, we used the Nonprofit Public Access Ordinance on both nonprofits involved. Ecology Center responded “Market Match does not receive any funding from the City and County of San Francisco.” In fact, it receives funding from the city via the Soda Tax. The 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor for Heart of the City Farmer’s Market, ironically named Matter of Trust, ignored our request. Finally, the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force told us they couldn’t help because no one nonprofit received more than $1 million per year from the city.
As a result, the full check redemption data remains a mystery. Given everything else we’ve documented, we’re confident that there are vendors with outsized revenue from food stamp coupon redemptions, including coupons that were traded for cash rather than food.
The farmers’ market was a fairly popular site for SNAP fraud, because of the extra Market Match money available, but it accounted for only a minority of San Francisco’s SNAP fraud. More is routed through corner grocery stores, which record fake transactions to fraudulently collect reimbursements, and split the cash 50/50 between the corner store and the EBT card’s owner. In 2025, 11 people were charged with defrauding $4 million this way. “According to the criminal complaint, people involved with the scheme would walk around the Tenderloin and Mid-Market neighborhoods and shout out “EBT” until someone willing to participate in the payoffs would give them their card.” Like the farmers’ market fraud, this was a widely-known scheme operating in the open for quite a long time before it was shut down. Many other stores continue the same fraud, slightly less brazenly, and have evaded prosecution so far. The total amount of fraudulent SNAP reimbursements remains unknown. As of 2025, there were about 112,000 SNAP recipients in San Francisco — about an eighth of the city’s population — receiving about $387 million per year in SNAP benefits.
Governor Newsom’s office claimed SNAP theft in all of California had been reduced by 87 percent from $20.9 million monthly in January 2024, equivalent to an astonishing $250 million annually, equal to two-thirds of the entire SNAP benefits paid in the city of San Francisco, to $42 million annually as of November 2025. This was done largely by resetting stolen PIN codes. However, this figure counts only SNAP benefits which the recipient reports as stolen and then gets reimbursed by the state, and does not include fraudulent transactions made with the recipient’s connivance, such as those occurring at Heart of the City Farmers’ Market or those charged in the 2025 prosecutions.
What is striking about the fraud at Heart of the City Farmers’ Market is not so much its scale as its brazenness. Benefits were traded for cash in public, in full view and with full knowledge of vendors, market organizers, and security staff. We talked to many of the market’s vendors, all of whom were familiar with the practice and recognized the professional buyers. Most vendors considered them an annoyance, some approved, and one told us he didn’t let the fraudsters transact in front of his stall. Some vendors also spoke of being scammed with counterfeit vouchers. The market’s security guards, who keep order at the Market Match voucher exchange tent, until recently would let SNAP buyers set up mere yards away. On one occasion we saw a SNAP buyer rush into the tent to accost a SNAP recipient and offer to buy that person’s vouchers, and the security guard told her to back up and get out of the tent but did not otherwise intervene.
Only in March, when the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market learned of our investigation, did security begin to shoo away the most blatant buyers and sellers. Security guards tell us that at this time they received the direction to shut down these sales, and we have observed them telling buyers and sellers to transact elsewhere, including one case where market staff told a would-be seller that the sales had become “more trouble than it’s worth.” This effort to clean up the market has been mostly successful. Sales of vouchers for cash are rarer, buyers are no longer loitering at the exit of the market match tent, and the line for SNAP recipients to receive vouchers is noticeably shorter.
So far no effort has been made to apprehend those responsible. The market vendors laundering the illicitly purchased vouchers into cash are unidentified as of yet. The fraud continues, at a lower rate than before. According to security, they stop about five of these transactions per day. The same buyers keep returning, sometimes wearing different outfits to try to evade detection.
Ben Landau-Taylor studies society and industry; email: benlandautaylor@gmail.com. Dan Clemens Posch is a tech entrepreneur who lives in San Francisco; email: dc@dcpos.ch.