After years of effort (and waiting), residents of Connecticut finally have a cottage food law! Up until this point, only farmers could use a very restricted law to sell their canned produce.

I thought Connecticut was in good shape when they passed a bill over 3 years ago, but unfortunately, that law required the state health department to create additional rules (which took over a year to write), and then they spent another 2 years just trying to get them approved.

This makes Connecticut one of the most extreme examples of a cottage food law being hampered by governmental oversight. I explained (a lot) more about these potential law problems in my recent dissertation.... err, I mean, blog post about California's new law.

In other good news about things that have taken way too long to come to fruition, I'm happy to report that if you have a CFO, you can add your business to Forrager's map again. This feature has been out of commission for at least a year, and I'm so glad that it's finally back.

Lastly, just to give you a heads up on what I'm working on next. As you may have noticed, many of the laws on Forrager haven't been updated in awhile. Part of the reason for that is because re-researching a state can be a ton of work. For instance, I spent at least 8 hours last week on Connecticut, just to get all of the relevant info into the condensed form you now see.

But many people in this community are already much more familiar with their state's law than I could ever hope to be, and I'd like to be able to roll out law updates faster, both now and into the future. So I am going to work on a feature that will allow you to submit your knowledge into the website, using the same form that I work with behind-the-scenes. That way, updating a law can be a process of reviewing and merging information, instead of finding it all myself. Hopefully that will be a much more practical way of keeping this site up-to-date!

Whether you were waiting for CT's cottage food law, couldn't add your CFO to the map, or had incorrect info about your state's law, thanks for your patience! Slowly but surely, Forrager is getting back up to speed.

David