What we do
Todo Tasteful finds corporate buyers, verifies makers, publishes the standard, routes work, and holds the relationship with the buyer.
It is not a caterer, a kitchen, an employer, a delivery company, or a payment processor. Those are all businesses with staff, vehicles and regulations attached. Staying out of them is what keeps this simple enough to actually work.
| Party | Owns |
|---|---|
| Maker | The craft, the kitchen or studio, the licenses, the insurance, the ingredients, the price they quote, the delivery |
| Buyer | The event, the budget, the headcount, the venue access |
| Network | Finding the buyer, verifying the maker, the standard, the routing, the paperwork the buyer expects, the follow-up |
What you get out of it
A maker joining this network gets four things they cannot easily get alone:
- Corporate demand. Offices, property managers, and event planners order repeatedly and on budget cycles. They are hard to reach one at a time and easy to serve once reached.
- Everything around the food. How to price a job, how to quote it, how to pack it, what to put on the label, what it should look like when it lands. Most people who try this do not come unstuck on the cooking.
- A route to jobs bigger than they are. A single person cannot fill a 400-person conference. A Guild Job can (Working Together), and it needs contributors who have never run a business.
- A portfolio. Every job is photographed to a fixed spec (The Standard §5). The maker keeps the images. After ten jobs they have a body of work whether or not they stay.
And the maker keeps their own business. They are not an employee and not exclusive. If they build a direct client base out of this, that is a success, not a leak — a network that makes people independent will not run short of people who want in.
The ladder — pick your rung honestly
The three categories look similar from the outside and are wildly different to start. What separates them is not skill. It is food safety law.
Rung 1 — Floral arrangements · start this week
Flowers are not food. No health permit, no kitchen inspection, no cottage food regime. The barriers are commercial rather than regulatory: wholesalers generally want a business registration and a resale certificate before they will sell to you, and you need somewhere cool to condition stems.
Cash flow is the kindest here — flowers are bought against a confirmed order, so a job funds itself.
Rung 2 — Pastry & baked goods · start in 2–6 weeks
Most jurisdictions have a cottage food regime that permits some home-produced foods with registration and labeling, and those regimes generally reach shelf-stable, non-TCS baked goods. They generally do not reach cream fillings, custards, or cheesecake.
Which of your products land on which side is exactly what What You Can Sell makes you determine before you buy anything.
Rung 3 — Cheese & charcuterie boards · start in 4–10 weeks
This is the one everybody wants to start with, and it is the hardest. Cheese and cured meats are TCS foods — they need temperature control for safety — and building a board is food handling. Cottage food regimes almost universally do not cover it.
Realistically this means a licensed kitchen (shared commissary kitchens rent by the hour, which is how nearly every small food business starts), a food handler's or manager's certification, and in many places a caterer's permit.
None of that is a reason not to do it. It is a reason not to do it first.
The recommended path
Start on Rung 1 or 2 → bank 3–5 real jobs → build the photo portfolio
→ use that revenue to fund the Rung 3 licensing
Rung 3 costs money before it earns any. Rungs 1 and 2 earn money almost immediately. Fund the hard lane with the easy one.