How to Start & Market a Food Business from Your Home Kitchen

Determine what would be the best products for you to sell and garner a deeper understanding of what non-hazardous means, especially related to baked goods. Connect with tested recipe resources and spark ideas on what you could uniquely sell that reflects your talents and roots.

Learn about ways to increase sales with attractive and creative labeling and packaging. This lesson reviews key elements that need to go on your product label as well as how labeling and packaging can be a marketing opportunity.

This lesson covers the key elements of what goes into an effective and attractive display as well as explores ideas and opportunities for new venues and markets, such as weddings and various add-on sales.

Understand how to increase your profits through accurate and effective pricing. This lesson will cover the three most common approaches to setting the price for your food product: parity, cost-input calculation and market value. You have a great product, so avoid under-pricing it. You're running a for-profit business, after all.  Note on the Spreadsheet download: If you like crunching numbers, download the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet "Cottage Food Enterprise" from University of Minnesota Extension to enter sales and expenses to arrive at costs to product the products.

Explore how to connect with potential customers through authentically sharing and communicating your story. This lesson covers marketing basics for your business, including deciding on your company name, considering a logo, advertising, and initiating a public relation effort that involves writing a press release and sharing great photos of your products. Additionally, setting up a website, having a social media presence, and leveraging connections with people and organizations that may be eager to support your business will be examined.

Keeping yourself and your business organized is a key element of both keeping your enterprise profitable and your life in balance. Learn how to set-up and organize your kitchen for maximum results. Review some tips for identifying priorities and best practices so you can manage your business while balancing it with other aspects of your life, like holding down a day job, caring for kids, or taking care of a family member. Just because it’s a business doesn’t mean it can’t be super fun.

Understand the key elements of preparing non-hazardous food products safely in your home kitchen. Create a safe work-zone at home.

This lesson will cover the seven (and often quick!) steps to launch your business. Specifically, it will examine the three options for structuring your business -- as a sole proprietor, limited liability company or S corporation -- and the benefits and drawbacks of each. It will also address managing risk with insurance and cover other potential regulatory requirements you might encounter depending on your state’s cottage food law.

Dig into details of managing the financial aspects of your business, from developing a simple “back of the napkin” business plan to get started quickly to understanding how to manage and track legitimate and deductible business expenses. The lesson will explain what a profit and loss statement is, the importance of keeping good records, both of sales and expenses, as a part of bookkeeping and finally, how accounting provides insight in terms of your business profitability.

Are your food business vision and dreams bigger than what your state’s cottage food law and home kitchen can provide? This lesson goes through what to evaluate before expanding your business into some form of commercially licensed facility, examining some of the pros and cons you might face.

This lesson covers some of the ways you can scale up your options using one of several commercial options, like using a co-packer, renting a shared incubator kitchen or existing commercial kitchen at a restaurant or church, or building your own commercial kitchen.

The future of the home food business movement depends on cottage food operators remaining engaged and involved in the advocacy process, voicing their support to legislators and the media for expanded and improved laws, and to state agencies responsible for interpreting and implementing the regulations. This lesson covers the basics of the legislative process and how to have your voice effectively heard, whether supporting an expansion of your state’s cottage food law or its specific regulations.

Get hungry for the next wave of home-based entrepreneurship: Food freedom. These state-specific laws expand the cottage food law concept to include other food items including almost any homemade food without any cap on sales or any licensing, permitting, or inspection requirements. This lesson gives an overview of the current status of Food Freedom laws and opportunities they may hold in the future.

You did it! Congratulations on completing this course and launching your own home-based food product business, perhaps starting tomorrow. You likely have everything you need in your home kitchen to get baking or canning. This lesson serves as the course wrap up, hits a few highlights and includes an invitation to the first-ever Home-based Food Entrepreneur Virtual National Conference to be held April 6 to 9, 2021.

COVID-19 threw a curveball to the world, including home-based cottage food businesses. This lesson takes you through key considerations when launching or operating your food product business during a pandemic, including increased safety protocols as well as introducing many new market opportunities.

The road to legally selling non-hazardous baked goods in Wisconsin is a long one with multiple roadblocks which have been successful overcome. This lesson gives a synopsis of the history, starting with Wisconsin's pickle bill and ending with the lawsuit brought against the state over the ban on selling baked goods that eventually led to the Circuit Court Judge Duane Jorgenson’s historic ruling in 2017 that makes it legal for home bakers to now sell non-hazardous baked goods made in a home kitchen in Wisconsin.

This lesson covers the basics for selling non-hazardous home baked goods in Wisconsin under the Circuit Court Judge Duane Jorgenson’s historic ruling in 2017 that lifted the ban on the sale of non-hazardous baked goods made in a home kitchen.

This lesson covers the basics for selling non-hazardous high acid canned food products in Wisconsin under Wisconsin's Pickle Bill.