PurFoods, LLC is a meal delivery company in Ankeny, Iowa — a suburb of Des Moines. Between 2018 and 2024, they billed Medicaid $910 million, making them one of the 50 highest-billing providers in the entire country.
Ninety-three percent of their revenue — $849 million — comes from a single billing code: S5170, "home-delivered prepared meal." They served 4.27 million beneficiary-encounters through this code, along with 49.5 million claims.
What PurFoods Does
PurFoods operates under the brand name "Mom's Meals" and delivers medically tailored meals to Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries. They're one of the largest players in the home-delivered meals space nationally, serving people who are homebound, recently discharged from hospitals, or managing chronic conditions that require specific diets.
Their billing breakdown shows the scale of the operation:
| Code | Description | Total Paid | Claims | Beneficiaries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| S5170 | Home-delivered prepared meal | $849M | 49,463,886 | 4,268,714 |
| W1760 | $50M | 784,023 | 203,382 | |
| S9977 | Meals per diem | $3M | 103,115 | 27,788 |
| S9470 | Nutritional counseling | $1M | 25,040 | 23,119 |
At $849 million for 4.27 million beneficiary-encounters, the average works out to about $199 per beneficiary — spread across the 7-year period, that's roughly $28 per person per year in meal deliveries. At the individual meal level, with 49.5 million claims, that's about $17 per meal including delivery.
Context
Home-delivered meals are a well-established Medicaid benefit, particularly for people who might otherwise need institutional care. The logic is straightforward: keeping someone fed at home is cheaper than putting them in a nursing facility. Multiple studies have shown that medically tailored meal programs reduce hospital readmissions and emergency department visits.
PurFoods/Mom's Meals has faced scrutiny before. In 2023, they issued a nationwide recall of certain meal products. They also disclosed a data breach affecting over 1.2 million customers. These are operational issues, not billing issues, but they're part of the company's public record.
The $910 million figure is striking in absolute terms, but the per-unit economics look reasonable for a national meal delivery operation serving millions of chronically ill people. The question isn't whether meal delivery is legitimate — it clearly is — but whether the volume and pricing hold up to scrutiny at this scale.
Explore PurFoods' complete billing profile, including monthly spending trends, at their provider page. Or see all providers billing code S5170 (home-delivered meals) nationally.