Festival Foods Managers Are Reading About a $7.5 Million Overtime Settlement. Nothing Has Been Approved, No Class Has Been Certified, and the $7,418 Average Being Quoted Does Not Survive Long Division.

The case was filed on April 24, 2025 in the Western District of Wisconsin. Festival Foods answered on May 19, 2025. On February 11, 2026 the court authorised notice to a group of salaried department managers, to be mailed by March 25. On March 24 — one day before that deadline — the court stayed the case, and reporting at the time said the notice process had been placed on hold. Whether the mailing ever went out is something we could not establish. A notice of settlement reached the docket on April 17, 2026, and the motion to approve the agreement — docket 125, with a supporting brief and three declarations — was filed on August 21, 2026.

Since then: nothing. The last docket entry is a certificate of service dated August 28. There is no preliminary approval order. Which means there is no claim deadline, no opt-out deadline, no objection deadline, no final approval hearing date and no publicly named settlement administrator. Any page telling you to file a Festival Foods overtime claim today is inventing a process that does not exist yet.

One honest limit on this report: docket entries 125 through 129 — the settlement papers themselves — are not available free of charge. They exist only behind PACER. So the allocation formula, the attorney fee amount, the service awards, the release language and whether unclaimed money reverts to the company are all unknown to us, and that is different from saying they do not exist. Our docket snapshot runs to August 28, 2026; if the judge ruled in the last week, we would not see it.

The figure travelling through the coverage is “an average gross payment of approximately $7,418,” with individual payments “as much as approximately $10,150,” for a group of about 1,000 workers. Multiply the first two of those: 1,000 × $7,418 = $7,418,000. Out of a $7.5 million maximum that also has to cover attorney fees, litigation costs, administration and service awards, that leaves $82,000 for all of it. A 1.1 % load for fees, costs, administration and service awards is not something we have seen in a wage-and-hour settlement, and it is hard to see how it would work.

So one of the inputs is wrong. The court record gives a different headcount: discussing separation agreements, the February 11 opinion refers to “approximately 730” department managers. Run the same arithmetic on 730 people and you get about $5.4 million in payments out of $7.5 million — roughly 27.8 % for everything else, which is exactly the range these settlements normally land in.

We are not asserting that 730 is the settlement class either; it is the number the court used for a different purpose. What we can say is that the 1,000-person version of the arithmetic is impossible, and that the $7,418 average should not be reprinted without that caveat. The complaint itself says only “hundreds.”

This case has two halves running on opposite rules, and almost every write-up flattens them into one.

The federal half is a collective action under 29 U.S.C. § 216(b). Judge Peterson set out the difference himself: “In class actions, class members are virtually represented by the named plaintiffs and are bound by the judgment unless they opt out of the class. In collective actions, the default rule is reversed: potential members of the collective must affirmatively opt in to the case by filing a notice of consent to join.” Do nothing under the federal claim and you are not in it.

The Wisconsin half, under the state's Wage Payment and Collection Law, is pleaded as a Rule 23 class — opt-out, where silence keeps you in. But it has never been certified. There is, at this moment, no Rule 23 class to be automatically part of.

The court was unusually blunt about the vocabulary. It called “conditional certification” “a misnomer” and required the plaintiffs to remove the phrase from the notice they proposed to send. Nothing in this case has been certified, conditionally or otherwise. Whether the pending motion asks the judge to certify a Rule 23 class “for settlement purposes only” — the usual route — is in the papers we cannot read.

There is also a trap in the dates. The court-approved notice runs from May 28, 2022. The complaint pleads three years back for the federal claim and only two years for the Wisconsin claim. On the complaint’s own periods the state group would be a full year shorter than the federal one. Which version the settlement adopts is in the papers we cannot read — and none of the three reports we checked mentions the difference at all.

The short version the court approved for the notice: “All current and former employees who worked in salary-paid department manager/supervisor positions below the Store Director/Assistant Store Director level at a Festival Foods store location anywhere in Wisconsin, at any time during the period beginning May 28, 2022 through the final disposition of this matter.”

In practice that means salaried department managers and their assistants — Bakery, Center Store, Deli, Food Court, Fresh Cut, Frozen/Dairy, HBC-GM, Kitchen, Grocery, Guest Services, Meat, Natural Foods, Produce, Receiving, Wine and Spirits, and the list is expressly open-ended — plus anyone who spent salaried weeks in the Emerging Leader, LEAD or GOLD training programmes. Expressly outside: Store Directors, Assistant Store Directors, HR Managers and HR Generalists, and after the April 2025 restructuring, Senior Center Store and Senior Fresh Foods Managers/Directors.

Wisconsin only. Both definitions say so, and the court's own opinion notes that the company “operates more than 40 stores across Wisconsin.”

One group should read carefully. Festival Foods argued that “at least 48” of the roughly 730 managers had signed separation agreements waiving their claims. The court declined to exclude anybody, because the company produced no signed agreement and named no individual: “Festival has failed to identify anyone in the proposed collective who should not receive notice, so the court will not exclude anyone at this time.” If you signed a separation agreement when you left, you are not automatically out — but your position is unresolved.

If you were a salaried Festival Foods department manager in Wisconsin since 2022 and a notice reached you in spring 2026, keep it — that was the opt-in step for the lawsuit, not for a settlement. Whether the mailing ever went out at all is unclear: the court stayed the case on March 24, 2026, the day before the March 25 deadline to send it.

Plaintiffs' counsel is the Head Law Firm, and its case page still invites people to sign a consent form to join. That page is out of date — it states that no answer has been filed, when the answer was filed on May 19, 2025 — and it has not been updated since the settlement was reached. Whether a consent form signed today still leads into the settlement is genuinely unclear: settlement agreements normally fix the beneficiary group as of a cut-off date, and that date is in the papers we cannot reach without PACER. Anyone in that position should call the firm and ask before assuming.

What was originally demanded gives a sense of the stakes: back pay plus liquidated damages equal to the back pay under federal law, and under Wis. Stat. § 109.11, “liquidated damages equal and up to fifty percent (50%) of the unpaid wages owed.” What the settlement actually allocates, and on what formula, is not public.

We will update this page when Judge Peterson rules on the motion.