Hi there,
I forgot to say this a few weeks ago, but
congrats to Oregon!Their new law (which passed last summer) is now in effect, which means that
producers in Oregon can now do a LOT more with their cottage food businesses:
- Make way more types of products (formerly restricted to only baked goods and candy)
- Sell a lot more (formerly limited to $20k, now they can sell $50k/year)
- Wholesale to stores (with some restrictions)
- Sell online
- Ship products
- Remove their home address from labels (by getting an ID instead)
As you can clearly see,
it's a huge win for Oregon!And there's
one more really important change that the bill made: allowing pets in the home for domestic kitchens.
Oregon actually has 3 laws for selling homemade food: their basic cottage food law, domestic kitchen law, and farm direct law (which is for growers/farmers).
Up until now, their
domestic kitchen law was
almost one of the best laws in the country, with one major caveat: pets could
never be anywhere in the home. Which resulted in the domestic kitchen law being a non-option for many people.
To lift the pet ban,
lawmakers added a first-of-its-kind requirement: a pet disclosure on labels. So if a producer has pets in their home, they must say so directly on their labels, and warn consumers of potential pet allergens.
I thought it was
a creative way to address concerns from those opposed, while still allowing producers to upgrade to the benefits that a domestic kitchen can provide. Hopefully this will inspire lawmakers to change the
last 4 remaining laws that have a pet prohibition.
So now, I'd say that
Oregon's domestic kitchen law is easily one of the best in the country for allowing producers to build a lucrative food business from home. It's
only the 2nd law to get 100% in every category in
my ranking system, the other being
Virginia's Home Food Processing law. The "catch" is that these laws are fairly complex and costly to setup, but not nearly as costly as opening a brick-and-mortar.
Overall,
Oregon's bill was easily the best of 2023, and I'm looking forward to what improvements are in store in 2024. More on that soon!
Forraging ahead,
David