Dr David A French, thermal process authority

I’d prefer to answer your questions on the site so others can benefit from the info. If you have questions beyond that, you should call your health dept.

Selling uncooked mushrooms would fall under the realm of the ag dept, similar to selling produce. It wouldn’t fall under the cottage food law and I don’t know the rules about selling those.

You need a commercial license and can’t produce at home: http://forrager.com/faq/#commercial

The letter of the law is that pets cannot ever be anywhere in the building where production is taking place, regardless of where the pets have access. I’ve not sure if your health dept would overlook that or not.

Salads do not fall under the cottage food law… you need a commercial license: http://forrager.com/faq/#commercial

The reason they are not on the list is because I couldn’t find any firm info online that verified that candy is allowed in MD. However, I also couldn’t find any evidence to suggest that they are not allowed. So I really don’t know, and you’ll need to call the health dept to find out.

The difference is that you are not meeting the end consumers like you would be at a farmers market, so it’s not allowed, as far as I know. Also, it’s not entirely clear what is an allowed food in Maryland, but tortillas are probably not allowed because they’re not baked.

If you get a standard commercial license, which requires the use of a commercial kitchen (only), then you can do just about anything possible… it’s just more complicated and more expensive, and less convenient if you’d rather cook in your home. But you could sell anywhere, including interstate and over the internet, and you would be given a license.

I haven’t seen any rules published by the Ohio ag dept, but generally, you should be individually packaging your samples in your home kitchen, and they should be opened by the consumer. That’s the way a number of other states do it, and you can’t go wrong with that. If you contact the ag dept, maybe their standards would be a bit more lenient…[Read more]

This would probably be fine, especially if you use water instead of milk. Since there’s a very small amount of milk, it’s possible that the sugars in the cookie dough would stabilize it and even that would be okay. The butter shouldn’t be a problem. Obviously you’d need to check with the ag dept. Technically, you should even be able to use…[Read more]

The list of allowed foods that matters is here, under questions 2 & 3: http://www.agri.ohio.gov/foodsafety/docs/CottageFoodOperation-factsheet.pdf

Ohio’s law used to be more limited and then they passed an amendment that expanded the list of allowed foods. It appears that only foods that are on the list are allowed. I don’t think there’s a reason…[Read more]