Delaware Paid $4.8 Million to a Company Called Random Rubber Chicken

Let's walk through this together, slowly. It is January 13, 2022. Omicron — the hyper-contagious COVID variant that tore through the country that winter — is setting case records in Delaware. There is not an at-home COVID test to be found in a pharmacy anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard. And on this day, the State of Delaware wires $4,776,148 in federal emergency money — filed under the deeply serious category of Medical Supplies — to a company whose legal, registered, federal-contractor name is RANDOM RUBBER CHICKEN. This is real. We checked. Then we checked twice more, because come on.

The ledger doesn't blink

Here is how Delaware's official transparency portal records one of its emergency agency's largest single-day payments of the entire pandemic — with the emotional range of a parking receipt:

Source: State of Delaware Checkbook, data.delaware.gov — check #0000060337, FY2022, fiscal period 7. No note. No explanation. Just a rubber chicken sitting in the middle of a pandemic ledger.

Somewhere in Delaware, a government employee typed RANDOM RUBBER CHICKEN into the state's payment system. A second person reviewed it. The system printed it on a check for four million, seven hundred seventy-six thousand dollars. At no point in this chain did anyone leave so much as a comment for the public record. We simply have to respect the professionalism.

Yes, it's a real company

Random Rubber Chicken is a registered business at a strip-mall suite in Lubbock, Texas, with a Better Business Bureau profile — category: Personal Protective Equipment, rating: A+, two listed co-owners. Its federal contractor registration described a woman-owned liquidation wholesaler; a chamber-of-commerce listing has it dealing in "baby items, PPE, COVID-19 testing kits, liquidation truckloads, grocery items, home decor, tools, and office supplies" — which is either a supply chain or a yard sale, depending on the week.

No — not actual rubber chickens

Before anyone asks: the state did not buy $4.8 million of novelty poultry. The checkbook has categories for that sort of thing ("Promotional Supplies," "Recreational Equipment") and this purchase used neither — it's coded Medical Supplies, on federal emergency funds, which come with FEMA-grade paperwork. "Random Rubber Chicken" is just the name. For scale: that same week the feds set a $12-a-test reimbursement benchmark, KFF found retail prices as high as $25, and bulk state buys ran well under $10. At broker prices in that range, $4.8 million is on the order of half a million to a million at-home test kits — about right for a state of one million people handing kits out at libraries. If it was masks, call it five million N95s.

And in fairness to the buyers, look at the week on the calendar. This was the very peak of the Omicron wave. The day before this check, Delaware set its all-time COVID hospitalization record — 759 people, per the state's own weekly update. The Friday before that, the state logged 4,771 new cases in a single day, the most of the entire pandemic. If there was ever a week a state would wire five million dollars to anyone who could actually deliver test kits, it was precisely this one. That's the context, and it's real. It is also, of course, exactly the kind of week when nobody reads the vendor name twice.

For the record, Delaware's checkbook contains several other chicken-adjacent vendors — Chicken Little Farms, Coastal Chicken, Blaine's Chicken Inn — and every one of them sells actual chicken. Only one chicken on the ledger sells medical supplies.

We're not saying anything went wrong. We're saying: look at it.

Everything here may be perfectly fine. Emergency procurement rules exist so agencies can move fast when pharmacy shelves are bare, buying from brand-new brokers was standard nationwide practice in 2020–2022, the company has a clean record, and the state may well have gotten exactly what it paid for at a fair crisis price. That is genuinely the most likely story.

But the entire point of publishing a checkbook citizens can read is that citizens get to look at a line item and say, out loud, "I'm sorry — what?" Consider it said. The fair questions, four years on: What was delivered? At what unit price, compared with what states paid manufacturers directly? How was a Lubbock liquidation outfit selected to receive one of DEMA's biggest single-day payments of the pandemic? And is there really no field in the state's accounting system for "you're going to want to write a sentence of context on this one"? The transparency portal got us this far. The rest is one very entertaining FOIA request away.

Epilogue: the chicken today

We visited the company's current website. There is no mention of test kits, masks, PPE, or medical supplies of any kind — the $4.8 million chapter appears nowhere in the story the company now tells about itself. What does a pandemic liquidation wholesaler become when the pandemic ends? Glad you asked:

Emergency medical supplies to bespoke soda flavors and role-playing-game merchandise, in four years. Honestly — respect the pivot. And it's worth saying: that's normal for a liquidation wholesaler. You sell whatever the moment demands, and in January 2022 the moment demanded test kits and paid $4.8 million. The company doesn't mention that chapter anymore. Neither does Delaware. That's why we're both here.

Check it yourself

Query the State of Delaware Checkbook for vendor "RANDOM RUBBER CHICKEN," or start from the vendor's profile page and the Department of Safety & Homeland Security. Here's exactly what you'll see:

data.delaware.gov — State of Delaware Checkbook · search: "random rubber chicken"

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