Folks who want to make food in their home or garage and sell it are part of a growing business segment. By many accounts, the cottage food industry is growing in North America. The county extension agents I support are fielding an increased number of questions of how to break into the food industry in the past year. The situation in other states is apparently similar.

Twenty U.S. states allow certain foods to be processed in the home and sold for consumption – but it’s a patchwork of regulatory approaches. In some states, the entire process is deregulated for certain exempt products. These products usually are limited to direct-selling (at a farmers’ market or roadside stand) of baked goods, jams and jellies. According to Forbes.com, Colorado is jumping into cottage food production:

The farmers would first have to take a food-handling safety course, and not all foods would be covered – only those deemed a minimal safety risk, such as jellies, breads or roasted chilies. In addition, farmers would have to grow some of the ingredients on-site, and they could only make $5,000 a year per product before having to adopt commercial oversight.

Recently Michigan adopted a new law allowing for home-based food production. In the absence of inspection, the law requires each item to have a label saying it was produced in an uninspected home kitchen, listing the food’s ingredients and any known allergens, and includes the producer’s name and address.

What makes me nervous about the exempt/deregulation path and slapping a label on it is that there isn’t someone there initially to ask the questions about what folks are doing that qualifies them for the exemption. This discussion can trigger a conversation about risks and find that the producer isn’t really addressing all the things necessary to protect their customers. Exemption makes it so the entrepreneur has to start from scratch and be the food safety expert – sometimes with no real direction. What Colorado is proposing for cottage industry processors looks like a good step to get into that initial risk discussion with small processors, but the State Senators might want to look at risks as well:

Senators hearing the cottage food bill last week seemed to love the idea (of the cottage industry bill), and [Sen. Gail] Schwartz even passed out a recipe for her favorite homemade peach chutney.

One of the more popular types of cottage industry foods is home preserved foods, like the State Senator’s chutney. Although federal rules are in place for acidified foods, it’s really unknown how much of the product sold at farmers’ markets, small retailers or road stands meets the guidelines — including safe recipe evaluation.

In 1977 patrons of a Michigan Mexican restaurant were unluckily part of one of the largest botulism outbreaks in the U.S..Fifty-nine Illnesses were linked to hot sauce that was made with jalapenos that were improperly canned. Investigators found that some of the jars of jalapenos were filled and sealed with no processing. Peppers, a low acid vegetable, need to be processed using a pressure canner to inactivate C. botulinum spores.

Having a mandatory food handler course for processors and talking about risky practices/risky recipes might help avoid the sometimes tragic outbreaks.