Today about 31 states have so called “cottage food laws,” allowing legal home-based food production on a small scale. The alternative is renting a commercial kitchen, which can cost $10 per hour, more often $25 or higher. Many of the laws passed recently thanks to grassroots efforts by bakers and jam makers eager to generate extra income, build a food community, control their cooking environments, and/or work at home. State guidelines differ, usually prohibiting riskier foods such as refrigerated items.

As a petition gathers momentum in California, along with a Facebook group, I took a look at the challenges and success of a few food entrepreneurs operating under cottage food laws in a time where local food reigns and career “Plan Bs” have become more like Plan A.

In most states, proponents have faced uphill battles. Two key objections tend to pop up:

It’s not fair to businesses that invest in commercial facilities.

As with the food truck versus restaurant battles, yes it’s more competition. I was thinking about a baker in Los Angeles who makes beautiful decorated cookies out of her bakery. If suddenly hundreds of home bakers could do the same without the overhead costs she might possibly need to drum up more commercial business to keep the bakery going.

But it’s also worth looking at the positive economic impact. Denay Davis, who runs a resource website for home bakers, believes “little food crafters are simply not a threat. It’s about sharing with other people, having control, and building relationships–not making a killing.” Etsy sellers exemplify typical cottage food law businesses, although many states only allow selling homemade goods locally, not online.

Retirees can supplement limited incomes. “If this was my only income I’d be earning about 40 percent of what I need. I didn’t have to make any capital investments. It’s a nice retirement job for me,” said Beth-Ann Betz, who bakes Middle Eastern pastries.

The laws also help those needing gluten-free or nut-free environments. “We’re gluten-free at home,” says Michigan baker Julie Rabinowitz. “So it’s easier to bake with confidence at home, without having to pay hourly to scrub someone else’s kitchen free of gluten.” The Michigan law caps her Tasty Sans Gluten sales at $15,000. It’s a delicate balance as commercial kitchens can run $12,000 a year. “My farmers’ market customers worry about price increases when I move to a commercial kitchen,” she adds.

Anni Minuzzo, California food consultant and former biscotti company owner, likes the idea of a cap. “It’s more fair to businesses who start out paying for a kitchen.” A cap also forces those who have outgrown their home kitchen to expand. Lori Jordan knows that “in the future if we want to grow beyond New England, we will have to move to a bigger place and hire more people.”

It’s not safe and clean.

The laws generally require the same FDA Good Manufacturing Practices required by larger food businesses. Many call for ServSafe food safety certification, no pets, and defined cleaning procedures (see Arizona‘s law). “New Hampshire has a good model,” says Betz. “I have a dishwasher, clean water that is tested, and ServSafe certification.”

Kelly Masters, owner of Cake Boss software, started her Texas cake business at a kitchen the Health Department had scored highly. But, she says, it “was so unclean that I would sometimes come home crying. I didn’t even want to sell cakes I made there.” Kelly went on to advocate a Texas’ cottage food law (passed September 2011).

Several years ago, Davis contacted all the departments of agriculture. “None had received sickness reports,” she says, adding that with very small batch production in all likelihood only a few people might be affected. Most or all states require a label to the effect of “made in an uninspected home kitchen,” letting the buyer beware.

“Maine requires us to have the same inspections, insurance, and file all the same paperwork as if we were a commercial kitchen,” says Lori Jordan of Out on a Limb.

One retailer who has seen a few questionable home food processors feels the rules should allow for spot inspections, unannounced–resulting in self-regulation. Could a new industry for a third-party inspection services arise, contributing further business license and tax revenues?

Realizing the economics of starting my own food business didn’t add up, I agree getting started on a small scale at home makes sense while proving the market. Seeing an array of local jams at the airport rather than only brands you can find everywhere makes a place special and keeps the home fires burning.

Need further inspiration to get your home-based food production business up and running? See also the San Jose Mercury News article on the California petition and this article on how to advocate for a cottage food law in your state.

Samin Nosrat is a veritable poster girl for the current trend (some would say necessity) of workplace reinvention.

Since the shuttering last summer of Eccolo, an acclaimed Italian eatery on tony 4th Street in Berkeley, that restaurant’s one-time sous chef now juggles an impressive number of part-time jobs in the culinary world.

Nosrat is the co-creator (along with former boss, Chris Lee, currently cooking in London) of the much buzzed about Pop-Up General Store, a fleeting food market every few weeks housed in the Grace Street Catering headquarters in Oakland’s hipster ‘hood known as the Temescal area.

The Pop-Up sells top-notch prepared foods by notable Bay Area chefs, many of whom, like Nosrat, who sells homemade pasta and Lee’s signature sausages, are Chez Panisse alum.

This 30-year-old daughter of Iranian immigrants grew up in a food-conscious home where freshly prepared, seasonal Persian dishes were a staple.

A stint in Italy reinforced the importance of a cultural connection to food, which she passes along in cooking and butchering classes under her Home Ec moniker and on the road with urban farmer and friend Novella Carpenter.

Nosrat picks up the occasional shift at Chez, where she got her start, and includes some well-known Berkeley names among her private cooking clients (she’s mum on that matter, for public consumption anyway, in case you’re curious.)

Oh, and she also “pops up” to cook afterhours, family-style, fixed menu dinners once a month at Tartine Bakery in San Francisco.

The mastermind behind a Bakesale for Haiti benefit that netted $22,500 from three Bay Area locations last January, Nosrat even finds time to write about her gastronomical adventures, most notably for The Atlantic online this week.

She lives in North Berkeley, where this interview took place over an impromptu picnic of pickled produce under consideration for a future Pop-Up event.

Why a Pop-Up General Store?

Chris and I missed cooking for our customers. We wanted to find a way to make and share the foods we love without carrying the burdens of a restaurant on our shoulders. We quickly realized how much fun it would be to share this format with our friends, many of whom we’ve been cooking with for years, so we invited other professional cooks and food artisans to join us.

It took off really fast. I think it fills a need in the community, it connects us with customers who crave the kind of food we want to create, and it’s more affordable than going out to eat.

Where do you like to take out-of-towners when they visit?

Gioia Pizzeria. I like their New York-style crust, it’s a little bit sweet and chewy. And they put crazy seasonal stuff on top like zucchini, pesto and ricotta in the summer and butternut squash and blue cheese in the fall.

The 100 percent organic Thursday farmers’ market, of course.

And Ici. I love ice cream and every time I go in there I’m struck by how much care and technique goes into each scoop. It’s affordable luxury, restaurant-quality food at a fraction of the cost. Plus ice-cream makes everyone feel like a little kid again, if only for a moment.

What’s missing on the Berkeley food scene?

A great organic salad bar. I love salad. It’s all I want sometimes: A big bowl of little gem lettuce, beets and avocado. Or a farro and nut combo, or romaine doused in green goddess dressing.  If there was a place where you could bring a plate and choose from, say, 20 salads I would eat there every day.

Who are your local food heroes?

Alice Waters and Michael Pollan. Okay, I know everyone probably says these two. But for me, it’s not some kind of abstract connection, I have ties to both of them and feel honored and lucky I do.

Alice Waters raised the standards for what we eat across the board. I think her greatest gift, which is rarely acknowledged, is the value she places on the beauty and aesthetics of the eating experience. If you learn anything while working at Chez Panisse it is attention to detail.

Michael Pollan seeks to democratize the food movement. He has a unique ability to explain what’s wrong and what needs changing –often quite complex issues — but he boils them down to their elemental parts and make them really accessible.

What’s the best thing about the food movement here?

Its thoughtfulness. Everywhere you go you find people who really think about what they’re growing, cooking, and eating. People pay attention to where their food comes from. That can be a double-edged sword, some people can seem overly picky or snobby about food.

We live in a bubble here in the Bay Area. We have access to some of the best, freshest produce in the country. When Novella and I were in Kansas City, Missouri last summer we couldn’t find somewhere to eat that wasn’t a chain restaurant. That’s why I think it’s so vital that we encourage and empower Americans to return to the kitchen.

Photo: Bart Nagel

Originally published on Lettuce Eat Kale

Henry writes the Berkeley Bites column for Berkeleyside, where this post also appeared.

Fast food is the ultimate American invention — cheap meals for people on the go. But we’ve paid a heavy price for our national addiction — an epidemic of obesity, the destruction of our fragile environment, and the loss of community ties that are maintained by taking the time to prepare and eat food together.

Despite these negatives, the need for quick affordable food is undeniable in today’s world. But why on earth are McDonalds and its competitors our only option? Every single time I get hungry on the road, in an airport, or at a shopping mall I wish someone would open a healthy fast food restaurant… and it turns out the wait is finally over. Amanda’s Feel Good Fresh Food restaurant opened it’s doors for business in Berkeley at the end of July 2008.

The restaurant happens to be located right downstairs from my office so I was among the first to check it out (read my review here.) I’m pleased to report that Amanda’s is pretty much exactly what I’d been wishing for–the food is healthy (they have the nutrition guidelines to prove it, too), tasty, and affordable (a cheeseburger made with naturally raised beef and organic cheese is $4.50, baked sweet potato fries are $1.50, and a freshly made agave-sweetened soda is $1.75.)

Amanda’s also goes out of its way to reduce its impact on the environment. For example, they won’t sell bottled water since it creates too much landfill waste and takes a lot of petroleum to transport. Everything served in the restaurant is also fully compostable so any “trash” left over at the end of your meal can be deposited in one of the restaurant’s green bins that feed directly into Berkeley’s city composting program where it will become rich soil for local farms and city landscaping projects in a matter of months. The restaurant also tries to foster a sense of community with a series of events in the restaurant and around the neighborhood. The future of fast food has never looked so green nor so healthy!

Amanda is often behind the counter in the restaurant, filling orders alongside her team (the handwritten “Amanda” on her wooden name tag was the only thing that tipped me off.) I was curious to know more about how she’d gone about making her idea a reality and what her plans were for the future of the restaurant so I introduced myself. She was kind enough to meet with me and answer my questions late last week.

How did you come up with the idea for Amanda’s? What prompted it?

I’d wanted to someday run a business that had a social and environmental mission ever since college when I was inspired by a book I read by Tom Chapel, the founder of Tom’s of Maine. So I always had that in the back of my mind. I went into technology when I graduated from college because that’s where there was great opportunity to learn business — I figured I needed to learn about business first and then I could figure out how to bring in the social mission.

I went back to business school because I wanted to focus on businesses with a social mission. Stanford has a really great social responsibility/public management program. At first, I actually thought I wanted to work at Trader Joe’s because I love their products – a lot of them are organic and natural and they’re affordable. They also treat their employees well – it’s just a cool culture. But when I learned more about it, I found that it wasn’t very entrepreneurial and after being in the technology industry, I realized I had grown used to that. So I thought I would intern for a smaller company whose products I was really excited about. I ended up interning for Niman Ranch which is a natural meats company that was located in Oakland. And that was the summer that the movie Supersize Me came out and I also read Eric Schlosser’s book, Fast Food Nation.

The summer I was at Niman Ranch, I did operations and marketing projects and got to do some ride-alongs on their delivery trucks. We came up to Berkeley and went to Chez Panisse and Whole Foods and some other really nice grocery stores and I realized that that quality of food was not reaching many people, and definitely not reaching the people Schlosser writes about in Fast Food Nation. So that’s when I started thinking about this need. Then I spent my second year of business school focusing on building a business plan for the restaurant, researching the market, and talking to everyone in the restaurant industry. When I graduated from business school, I decided to actually start implementing the plan.

Once you’d had the idea for the restaurant, what was the path to making it a reality?

I think almost everyone who saw the movie Supersize Me had the same idea – that was the clear reaction. But the restaurant industry is really challenging and a lot of people who had the same idea probably didn’t pursue it because it’s so tough – there’s a lot of competition and profit margins are slim — that’s what I found out after studying it more in business school. But I also knew that I had the passion to do it anyway.

There are just hundreds of people who’ve helped build this. The restaurant has my name on it but it’s definitely a community effort. In business school there were probably half a dozen classmates of mine and also people in other graduate programs helped put the business plan together. It was very well-researched which I think gave me confidence in it as well as giving a lot of other quality people the confidence to invest in the business both financially and with their time as advisers or as the consultants that helped design the menu and helped design the space.

Since I work right upstairs I walk past Amanda’s all the time and I also eat there often. It seems to be a melting pot of sorts. I see a pretty diverse mix of customers — Berkeley high students (who tend to frequent the non-healthy fast food joints in the neighborhood), UC students, local professionals, young parents, hippies, security guards, and other people who look like they’d be equally at home in the McDonalds up the street. Would you say that is an accurate description of your clientele? And is that what you expected?

It’s what I hoped! It’s interesting because we thought that women would be our core customer (and I think they still are though I haven’t spent enough time analyzing our customer base and actually counting customers) because women tend to care more about their health and make a lot of the restaurant decisions for their families and co-workers but it has been even more diverse than I expected. That’s one of the things I like about being in Berkeley–we’re not only bringing healthy food to people who already eat healthfully, there are also so many different people here that we can start actually making a change in the way some people are eating.

Have you considered listing where you source your different ingredients from on your menu or your web site?

It’s a balance, we try to talk about it on our web site but also not everyone wants to know. I’d rather source things locally (and it’s cheaper to do that!) but you can’t get organic tomatoes locally all year round or local organic apples so sometimes they have to come from New Zealand because we offer our apple fries all year long. It’s interesting — everyone is so enamored of Niman ranch. If you say you buy your beef from Niman Ranch, people automatically assume that it was raised up in Marin County but in reality their meats come from ranches all around the country. We source our meat with a local family-owned distributor that sources its meats similarly to the way Niman Ranch does. So if people ask, we tell them our beef is from the Midwest and raised all-naturally. The veggies are as local as we can get them – they’re sourced through a local produce company.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Well, one thing that I didn’t talk about is that everything we do, all the decisions we make in the restaurant are based on our goal of creating a healthy community. For example, when we’re deciding whether to buy local or to buy organic, that is what we use as our decision-making metric. This goal of a healthy community is something that we’re trying to foster with our own customers and with our employees – we got all our staff trial memberships to the YMCA and Funky Door Yoga to encourage them to exercise. And they’re really inspiring – most of them find more time to exercise than I do! Our team really makes us what we are – we’d be nowhere without them.

Photos: Eve Fox

The ingredients for green collar economic renewal via food-based businesses have been stewing for a few years in the Mission at La Cocina. Entering its fifth year of operation in 2009, La Cocina was founded to provide kitchen space and assistance to food entrepreneurs – many of them low-income and all of them women – helping them in starting new businesses or grow their home-based businesses into stable ventures.

Speaking with Caleb Zigas – the Director of Operations – the clarity and focus of the La Cocina mission is evidently an asset. “We are supporting the entrepreneurs to the point where they can graduate into owning their independent operations – so it’s pretty clear how we define success,” says Caleb. The services they provide are varied, from monthly meetings to set goals for each entrepreneur to introduction to new products (Niman Ranch recently presented to the group). The day I visited, Culinary Director Jason Rose had spent the morning making Huaraches with one of the organization’s soon-to-graduate entrepreneurs, Veronica Salazar, and was busy scheduling the center’s four commercial kitchen spaces – which are used by La Cocina entrepreneurs as well as rented by local caterers and chefs who are not part of the program.

In a video hosted on the homepage of La Cocina featuring the story of Brazilian cookie star and owner of Kika’s Treats Cristina Besher, she explains “I like calling La Cocina ‘La Madre’, because that’s what it is – it nurtures you through the first years of business”. That is definitely the vibe and feeling of La Cocina – a warm welcoming kitchen, with a clear sense that you’ll also learn to balance your checkbook and to never leave the sink full of dirty dishes.

The support of La Cocina also extends to providing website and packaging assistance to entrepreneurs. Cellophane bags of spicy pepitas have a simple logo sticker, while sumptuous cookies filled with dulce di leche are crisply boxed. La Cocina also provides marketing support, selling products from entrepreneurs at Bay Area farmers’ markets on commission (the center consolidates products from many of the entrepreneurs in a single stand), and also works with entrepreneurs to assist them in developing direct-to-public sales at markets.

The fabric of a local food system is made up of the type of entrepreneurs that La Cocina is inspiring, supporting, and growing. Although La Cocina does not advocate for organic/local ingredients with their entrepreneurs (many opt into purchasing these ingredients of their own accord), the role they play in building a greener food system is crucial. These local entrepreneurs are providing access to quality foods prepared on a human – not industrial – scale, and they are supporting direct marketing efforts around the city by providing great value-added products for sale.

In 2009, Caleb estimates that six entrepreneurs will graduate from the program. When asked about how and if the program will expand given its evident success, Caleb responds that although they’d like to maintain their current size, they are not interested in expanding the operation beyond a potential future store or permanent marketplace to sell their entrepreneurs’ products. They’d like to share their model, though, by working with other groups and businesses to assist them in building incubators that learn from and build on La Cocina’s success. Find out more by checking out the great products on the La Cocina website, and check back to the site in December for gift boxes of foods made by La Cocina entrepreneurs. Also, if you live in the Bay Area, El Huarache Loco – at the Alemany market on Saturdays – is a La Cocina experience not to be missed. The Huarache is delicious and crisp, topped with onions, peppers, sausage – or, for the especially indulgent, fried eggs and mole sauce.

Photo: La Cocina