Grub Market

You can sell dry tea with the cottage food law, but you can’t sell homemade brewed tea. If you want to sell (non-homemade) brewed tea outside of your home, you’d need a commercial license: http://forrager.com/faq/#commercial

You should call your ag dept to make sure there aren’t any exemptions you can take advantage of.

You will probably still need a business license if your county requires it. However, using the cottage food law will help you bypass a lot of the strict requirements from the health dept, like inspections. I’m not entirely sure if they will allow buttercream frosting, though… check with your ag dept.

I believe that if the egg whites are cooked to a certain temperature, it will pass the non-potentially hazardous test, but you should check with local health authorities to confirm that the recipe is acceptable.

At least in San Diego and Orange County, you can use online calculators or laboratory testing for determining your nutritional value if you’d like to include a label. We’ve found there are easy to make/print nutritional labels at http://www.onlinelabels.com

In San Diego, anything that the product may come into contact with should be food-safe (i.e. bags, but not the boxes containing them or external labels).

In San Diego, most markets welcome CFOs. We’ve recently encountered a manager who will not allow CFOs into any of her 3 markets. The reason given was that it would increase their insurance costs. We are currently exploring whether or not that’s true. Any info you have would be appreciated. We’ve been told that CERTIFIED farmer’s markets do not…[Read more]

The short answer is, most likely, yes. You would not be using Virginia’s cottage food law. Here is the longer answer: http://forrager.com/faq/#nonprofit
Let me know if you need more info.

If you’re just using a teaspoon or two of vanilla extract in a cookie recipe, then you don’t need to worry about it. But if it’s a significant amount of alcohol, then you need to talk to your health dept to learn about what permits are necessary.

You won’t be able to use the cottage food law and make your ice pops at home. You should probably double check to make sure that that Berkeley business is actually legal. http://forrager.com/faq/#commercial

That’s correct.

It should be true, but there are some counties with weird ordinances. You can check with your local ag dept, but usually you don’t need a license from them to sell produce. You may need a business license or something else from other depts in your county, though.