The answer, for many, lies in the state’s cottage food laws, which aim not only to help producers of small-batch foods but also to protect the consumers who buy and eat them. These laws allow folks to produce low-risk “cottage foods” from their home kitchens and legally sell them on the market. Cottage foods include items such as jams, honeys, candies and certain baked goods.
“Really any kind of food that doesn’t require refrigeration or vegetables,” says Wendy Rice, family and consumer science agent for the La Plata County CSU Extension Office. “The idea is to prevent consumers from getting any kind of food borne illness. For example, if you have someone producing an oil flavored with garlic, that garlic is at high risk for botulism. It doesn’t take much botulism present to be fatal.”
Finding out whether the product you to wish to sell is both in compliance with the state’s cottage food laws and safe to distribute can be tricky. Thus, the state of Colorado requires producers to complete a food safety course.
To that end, offices like the CSU Extension offer cottage food certification courses. These courses teach health and food safety, and keep producers up to date on any modifications to the laws. For instance, one of the latest changes pertains to how much money a person is allowed to make within the law.
“Before, these producers were allowed to make $10,000 (per year) for each food item,” Rice said. “But with this latest change, each time you change the recipe, that’s another $10,000 you can make. So if you have this wonderful chocolate chip cookie, that’s $10,000, but then if you add walnuts to that cookie, that’s an additional $10,000 because it’s a different recipe.”
All of the fare that falls under the umbrella of cottage food laws can be sold person-to-person, at a bake sale, a farmers market, to a neighbor or a friend of a friend. In order to get food on a store shelf, such as City Market or Nature’s Oasis, that food must be cooked in a commercial kitchen and comply with the additional rules of the stores in which it’s being sold.
“Nature’s (Oasis) promotes all natural foods, so any food sold on our shelves must be free of any preservatives and it must be cooked in a commercial kitchen,” said Libby Storc, grocery manager at the store. “We also ask producers to provide labeling with a full ingredient list and provide us with wholesale pricing, and we prefer products with fun packaging and a story about who’s making the product.”
If their cottage food business takes off, cooks can go all the way by opening their own commercial-grade kitchens. Alternatively, they could also save some cash and rent out commercial cooking space. Many communities have state-inspected commercial kitchens available and Durango is no different, with kitchens available at both the La Plata County Fairgrounds and the Manna Soup Kitchen.
Cooks who conduct business out of their homes as well as those wishing to sell their fares within Durango city limits must also obtain a business license. These annually-issued licenses have a one-time processing fee of $30 and an annual fee based on the number of people being employed in the city.
The town of Bayfield has similar licensing laws, with annual licensing fees costing $45 for 2 employees or less, plus a $10 charge for each additional employee over two.
Outside of the individual municpalities, La Plata county does not require a cook to obtain a businees liscense to make cottage foods.
Contact Kacey Mallow at [email protected]
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