Fresno County approves home kitchen food business pilot

Fresno County supervisors unanimously approved a two-year pilot on Tuesday, June 30, opening a legal path for some residents to sell meals from their home kitchens under county health oversight. The move gives Fresno County its own version of California’s microenterprise home kitchen operation model and brings kitchen-based food sales into a system that already regulates about 4,600 retail food facilities.

Home cooks can avoid the overhead of renting a commercial kitchen, paying daily transport costs or taking on major debt while still operating inside a permit system tied to public-health checks.

Under California’s MEHKO rules, operators must apply through the local environmental health agency, pass an inspection and complete an approved food manager certification. They must sell food directly to customers, and the meals have to be prepared, cooked and served the same day. State guidance sets the limit at 30 meals per day and 60 meals per week, with a gross annual sales cap of $50,000, adjusted for inflation.

Microenterprise home kitchen operations may produce potentially hazardous foods, but only if they are served the same day they are prepared and not stored. Cottage food businesses remain narrower, limited to certain nonpotentially hazardous foods, and the California Department of Public Health bars a residence from having both a cottage food operation and a MEHKO at the same address.

In a June 14, 2024 board briefing, Fresno County said MEHKOs were not then authorized locally and recommended using state grant funding to study whether an ordinance made sense, including program development, public outreach, staff training, permit-fee offsets and enforcement. The county looked at similar programs elsewhere and found no counties that had abandoned the idea after the pilot stage.

Paola Salcedo pushed the pilot as a way to move food vendors out of the shadows and into compliance. County public health staff said the two-year window should give officials a more realistic view of whether the model works in Fresno County, where the Consumer Food Program already oversees restaurants, markets, school cafeterias, bakeries, bars, mobile food vendors and special event food booths.