Hi there,

I've been tracking cottage food bills for over a decade now. You could say I've seen a lot of cottage food bills in that time.

But I've never seen anything quite like what happened to Texas this year.

For one, I've never seen one state with so many cottage food bills in a single year! 5 bills in total.

It was an interesting strategy. Basically they had one main bill that encompassed everything they wanted to improve, and four mini bills that each focused on one of the improvements.

The concept being, in case the main bill fails, at least the other bills still have a chance to improve the law.

I thought it was pretty smart, and I was curious to see what would happen. Unfortunately, it appears that all four of the mini bills simply got ignored, and therefore died in committee.

I'm still not exactly sure why they got ignored, and I'd want to see this strategy tried in at least one more state before writing it off as ineffective.

So as a result, all of the attention focused on their main bill, SB 829. And boy did it get a lot of attention! I've never seen a cottage food bill with so much support.

How much support? Their main bill received a whopping 655 public comments, and from what I can tell, at least 95% of those were in support of the bill. Probably more like 98%. (Almost all of the "opposed" comments were from health officials.)

Usually a bill will get a few dozen written comments from the public, at best. In fact, nobody in Texas' House committee could recall seeing so much support on any bill ever before!

To be sure, it was an extremely strong showing for Texas this year. And it should have passed, but somehow, someway, their main bill died too.

And why did it fail? As we've already seen with Arizona and Minnesota this year, the answer, I'm afraid, is politics.

To greatly simplify a long story, basically the Senate & House ended up in a "civil war", which led to the House intentionally trying to kill as many Senate bills as possible. They succeeded in killing 80+ bills, of which SB 829 was one.

It doesn't appear that SB 829's demise had much of anything to do with the bill itself. On one hand, it's a promising sign for their next legislative session in 2025. On the other, it's such a shame because they simply got unlucky, and the bill would have benefitted so many people!

Kudos to Kelley Masters and the team she's built through the association she founded, Homemade Texas. She continues to lead the way as one of the strongest cottage food advocates in the nation, and their efforts have consistently gotten stronger from one session to the next. I look forward to seeing what they have in store for 2025!

Until next week,
David