David Crabill
@david
active 2 days, 5 hours agoForum Replies Created
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You can sell certain types of goods that don’t require refrigeration using this law: http://forrager.com/law/south-carolina/
You can sell lemon pies, but not lemon meringue pies, since those require refrigeration.
The farmers market may also have requirements beyond the cottage food law. You may also be interested in reading this: http://forrager.com/faq/#starting
Let me know if you have more questions.
Krystle, am I understanding correctly that you want to make your CFO products at your mom’s shop? That wouldn’t be allowed. You can only make products for your CFO from your own home. In fact, the entire production process, including packaging and labeling, should be contained to your home and shouldn’t happen in your mom’s shop. Then you would sell them to her and deliver them to her shop, ready to resell. So that’s how your business will need to operate — entirely separately.
Now assuming that your CFO stuff is all done at home, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t help your mom in her shop and work for her. As far as I know, it would be possible for a CFO to run their own side business and also work as an employee at a bakery, for instance. If that CFO then started selling their products to the bakery and ended up effectively reselling their own product, I don’t see why that would be a problem… if anything, it would be much closer to a direct sale, with a personal interaction with the producer and which the health dept generally sees as being safer.
If a CFO cannot also be an employee of a food establishment, then I’d be interested to know what law supports that interpretation. It’s actually very common for employees to choose to branch out and start their own business on the side.
And thanks for sharing the info about your mom’s business… that’s a side of the food industry that I’m fairly ignorant of, and it’s good to learn more.
No matter how small your business, you still need to go through all of the proper licensing procedures. If you can operate under the cottage food law, you wouldn’t need a permit from the ag dept, but you may need other permits. http://forrager.com/faq/#starting
Chocolate should be allowed under Ohio’s cottage food law. The only thing that could be a problem is that you may not be able to sell to a business. You’re supposed to be selling to the final consumer, and that individual would be informed that your products are homemade via your label. Obviously a business card would have the intention of being consumed by someone else, and that may mean that you need to use a commercial kitchen. http://forrager.com/faq/#commercial
You should call the ag dept for a definite answer to your question.
I’m not sure if MD’s cottage food law allows spices, but I do know that you can’t sell online, nor could you sell interstate. To do those things, you need to use a commercial kitchen: http://forrager.com/faq/#commercial
Yes. With few exceptions, anything beyond the cottage food industry requires a commercial kitchen. But using a rented kitchen and selling at others’ venues should still be relatively easy in comparison to setting up your own shop.
The health dept is correct. You are a CFO, and your mom would have to be a food processing establishment. Since a CFO can’t be a food processing establishment (by definition in the law), you can’t both be in the same business. It is possible to do what you want to, but you need to create two separate businesses — one for you and one for your mom. Your mom will have to adhere to much stricter standards than you will, and it should be much harder and more expensive for her to setup her business.
It’s possible that your mom could still be your employee and help you make the food product at home, but I’m not sure about that.
The law only allows baked goods, jams, jellies, and dried herbs, so by definition, everything outside of those categories is not allowed. A fully-baked chocolate cake would be allowed. It’s not a matter of whether or not a chocolate bar is safe… it’s just that the law was written in a very conservative way. They probably wrote it in that way because they knew that those few items would meet with relatively little resistance from the health dept and the bill could get passed.
If customers are eating at your shop, then you will be a food establishment and have to abide by all of the rules that pertain to those. I’m not an expert beyond the cottage food industry, so I can’t really guide you much further, but I can say that if you’re looking for something inexpensive and/or relatively easy then this probably isn’t it. You can talk to the health dept for more info on what it would take to start this kind of business.
I think there are hundreds of benefits, and of course some drawbacks as well. That’s a pretty open-ended question and there are good resources to find the long answer. Have you read this report? The first part of CA’s cottage food law also specifies some of the benefits of these kinds of laws. I’d recommend Homemade For Sale as well.
I think one of the major benefits is that it enables people to start providing more value to their communities with knowledge and resources they already have.
Donna, what state do you live in?
