Hi there,

We are not even halfway into 2024, and it's already a much better year for the cottage food industry than 2023 was.

Congrats to Alaska for joining the food freedom movement, with the passage of HB 251! Assuming this bill gets signed by their governor, this will become law in July.

Last year, no state passed a food freedom bill. This year, we already have two! (AZ is the other)

It's ironic that both of our non-contiguous states received major improvements this year (see my previous email about HI), given that neither state had been updated for many years.

Alaska's new law is all around GREAT! It will improve their current law in almost every way:

• Allows most perishable foods (including many with meat), plus all non-perishable foods
• Allows non-perishable foods to be sold indirectly through stores
• Removes the $25k sales limit
• Appears to allow in-state shipping

This was written as a brand new law, so although Alaska's older law will remain on the books, it will be mostly irrelevant.

BUT there is one aspect of the new law that is worse than their current one. Alaska's current law lets a producer put their business license number on labels instead of their name, address, and phone number. This new law has no such exemption.

So those who want to exclude their home address from their labels might continue using the older law for direct sales, and only use this newer law for indirect sales and perishable foods. I don't see any reason why they couldn't use both!

One other potential issue with this new law is that, unlike most food freedom laws, it doesn't include language that prevents a local government from overriding it. This especially might be an issue for residents in Anchorage, but we'll see.

But overall, this is an amazing improvement for our country's biggest state! And Alaskans should only have to wait one month to be able to use it!

Forraging ahead,

David