Cooking food in your home and selling it is legal in Cali. with a license | Hacker News Reader

Cooking food in your home and selling it is legal in Cali. with a license

leginfo.legislature.ca.gov

41 pointsirsagent21 comments

As long as there's a public health certification in place, no? Seems like this is the new microenterprise work being done to open up the food market and hopefully help strengthen local economies.

https://la.eater.com/2020/9/2/21418664/riverside-ab-626-home...

The lobbyist behind it (if you want to call him that) created Foodnome, a website and app. Looks like it was shared here a while back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18739066

https://foodnome.com/

Hilarious to see this trend taking off after a close friend of mine shuttered his exact same startup 4 years ago. They started in the UK, folks were skeptical, on the wrong side of regulations and just wasn’t able to build critical mass. Jury is still out whether Food Nome will succeed but a Good lesson that timing and location matters to startup success as well.

Josephine? HomeCooked? ShareTheMeal? DishNextDoor?

I was working on a concept in this space as well in the US northeast, until bumping up against the cottage food laws

Cottage food industry is really over regulated. I know a couple people who rented out kitchens and even started a small store, just so they could sell products.

Food Freedom bills have been promoted by some states. Many small businesses in some states, just take course and test for a license. That isn't allowed for most cottage foods. Decades ago, even bringing in home baked goods for your kids was banned at most places.

One place use to sell unpasteurized apple cider from an apple farm, it tasted so good, but was closed because unpasteurized is illegal almost everywhere. Which some states used as an reason for Freedom Food bills.

Please, update the headline and either use CA, Cal, or California. The only acceptable use of the word "Cali" is in a LL Cool J video.

Someone in 'frisco told me it was fine to use "Cali" whenever I want.

[ducking]

Is there anywhere that it's *illegal*? If there is, what kind of overregulated hellhole is that?

For your original question: you typically cannot sell cooked food from your home kitchen in the United States. This Californian law reflects a large relaxation from the status quo.

There are "cottage" food laws which allow the sale of baked goods, jams and jellies. But foods that require refrigeration after preparation are typically not covered.

https://ij.org/issues/economic-liberty/homemade-food-seller/ has a fairly good state-by-state summary. You'll note that even in the "dark green low regulation states", only Wyoming and North Dakota have no restrictions; Utah, Montana, and Oklahoma restrict meat.

edit: You seem to be in the UK. The regulatory environment is a lot more lax there. Inspections and approvals seem still to be required [1], but that's different from the general prohibitions found in the US.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/food-premises-approval

Well, the problem is... food safety is a medical nightmare when safety practices aren't observed.

As a personal note, the sickest I have ever been in my life was from food poisoning. The details are horrific, but imagine 3 days of violent diarrhea while at the same time throwing up. I couldn't even hold down water. My arms looked like, its hard to explain... the skin was draped over them. You could see every sinue of the musculature like I was a body builder, except I was a fat 30 year old. I went to the hospital and took 4 liters of saline.

All I did to earn that punishment was eat a few slices of pizza that had been left out too long.

If you please, the saga of the "pink sauce", which is the exemplar of why food safety has to be regulated:

https://youtu.be/fa-qq4lK0NY?t=2790

I vividly remember as a kid wanting a specific pizza that looked good to me, but my parents warned me it looked like it had been sitting under the lamps for too long. I won and got my pizza. Until I didn't, I nearly made it to the bathroom in the middle of the night before the vomiting started.

This short podcast about food safety questions has been fun to listen to, if slightly concerning occasionally. www.riskyornot.co

Food safety laws can be a tough thing to enforce for entry level products like the "pink sauce." There doesn't seem to be standard way to start food-from-home product until this law. Most food ventures normally would have to have a restaurant location that would then pass food safety checks, but this law, normalizes the process of a food-from-home business, taking the food safety checks to the home for approval.

I have never heard of anyone outside the US getting food poisoning.

Oh I'm going to need you to elaborate on that.

I like to imagine that there are some health inspection checks in place when I order food online.

Especially with the onset of the Mr. Beast burger which could be sold anywhere and consumers have no knowledge of the prep location and the assembling of the food. I could see a law with more regulations like this make the process have more trust for consumers.

Obviously, but why wouldn't you be able to prepare food at home to sell?

Because the "obvious" (your word, not mine) expectation is that you have the relevant health certifications when you're selling food to the public?

Is there some line between "selling food to the public" and "selling it online" that you think is important?

I'm not sure why you think I'm saying you shouldn't have the relevant certification.

It is highly regulated everywhere in the US, but a lot of people in every state are working to improve the regulations and reduce the burden while making sure that food safety is a priority.

Success leads to more success. Be happy that California has made an improvement; it will be used to make things better in your state next.

In the UK, if you sell food made at home, you are subject to all manner of laws that you must comply with — to not follow such laws does, to operate outside of such laws, means that one's business is not legal, and thus illegal, no?

I'm pretty sure that this is the same in lots of countries.

— Related story, cos it's arguably more interesting than the argument here... My friend makes and sells a Chilli Jam, from homegrown chillies. Just once a year. He used to make his jam batches at home. But ran afoul of the various rules and regulations that make up UK food law. So now he simply gets himself some time in the kitchen of an already established restaurant to make his batches, because it's much easier than setting up one's own home for such a business — particularly for a single annual batch.

Edit: sure, one could easily argue that the UK is an over-regulated hellhole, I guess /shrug

I imagine the context for something like was they put in place blanket regulations for food safety; kitchen must have a drain to make it easier to clean, water must be hot enough to sanitize, must be inspected periodically, food must be tested and labeled before sale. It's often later they come in and make exceptions for low-volume, low-risk situations. I've noticed "cottage food laws" have popped up over the past decade (California passed some back in 2012).

A similar example is home brewing beer. Obviously, Prohibition happened in the 20s and 30s and it was heavily regulated afterward. It wasn't until the 70s when it was legal to home brew beer. You still hear craft brewers complain about the laws around distribution for smaller guys.

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