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By Farmers Egg
Jul 11, 2018
Texas is enjoying a burst of entrepreneurship after enacting laws that let anyone turn a home kitchen into a business incubator. Under “cottage food” laws, people can sell food baked or cooked at home, like cookies, cakes and jams, if it’s deemed to have a very low chance of causing foodborne illnesses. Crucially, cottage food laws exempt home bakers from having to rent commercial kitchen space.
After winning Austin’s Best Chocolate Cupcake in the city’s Cupcake Smackdown, Amy Padilla decided to open a cupcake bakery in 2009. “At that time, a commercial bakery was my only option,” she said. But with rent averaging around $25 an hour, “it almost became cost prohibitive to continue.”
Not being able to bake at home posed other problems as well. Kelley Masters, a baker based in Cedar Park, found a rental kitchen for $15 per hour, but that rate was only available after 10 p.m. “So I would put my two-year-old son to bed,” she said, “pack a large laundry basket with supplies, and drive out to the commercial kitchen, and start baking, coming home around 1 or 2 a.m.” Sometimes she even had to waste time cleaning up after the previous renter.
After learning that other states had enacted cottage food laws, Masters became an activist, recruiting and rallying people to back legislation that would legalize selling homemade food. Their efforts paid off when Texas passed it first cottage food law in 2011.
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