What You Can Sell

Three questions decide everything

Q1 — Is what I make a TCS food?

TCS means time/temperature control for safety: food that supports rapid bacterial growth and must be held hot or cold. It is the single line that separates "you can start in your kitchen tomorrow" from "you need a licensed facility."

A cheese board is TCS almost by definition. Cheese, charcuterie, cut fruit — the three things that make it a cheese board are all on the left column. Assume Rung 3 needs a licensed kitchen until an inspector tells you otherwise in writing.

Flowers are not food and this whole question does not apply to you. Skip to §3.

Q2 — Where is it produced?

• Home kitchen → only viable under a cottage food exemption, only for the products that exemption covers, usually with a revenue cap, registration, and mandatory label wording.
• Shared / commissary kitchen → licensed, inspected, rented by the hour. How nearly every serious small food business starts. Your permit typically attaches to the facility.
• Someone else's licensed kitchen, working under their permit → the Contributor route in Getting Started §2. Confirm your jurisdiction treats this as covered.

Q3 — Whose rules apply?

Usually more than one office, and they do not check with each other:

1. State — cottage food / home food processing exemption, and food business licensing.
2. County or city health department — permits, inspections, and often the caterer's license. This is the office that will actually visit you.
3. Local zoning — whether a home business is permitted at your address at all. The most commonly skipped step, and the one that ends businesses.
4. Business registration and sales tax — the state's revenue side. Also what a floral wholesaler will ask for.

Where to call — the DC metro launch market

The network's initial market is the DC metro, because that is where the 245-row research dataset actually is. Three jurisdictions meet here and their rules are not the same. A maker in Takoma Park and a maker two miles away in DC are under different regimes.

Call, do not just read the website. Website summaries lag the regulation, and you want a named person and a date on your record for when a buyer's compliance team asks.

Ask exactly this:

"I want to make and sell [your specific products], produced at [home / a shared commercial kitchen], sold to [businesses for corporate events]. What license or permit do I need, and does my product qualify under the cottage food exemption?"

The phrase "sold to businesses" matters. Several cottage food regimes permit direct-to- consumer sales only, and B2B catering is precisely what this network does. Say it out loud on the call.

Record the answer — this is the compliance artifact

One page per maker, kept on file by the network. It costs nothing and it is the difference between a defensible network and a hopeful one.

MAKER LEGAL GATE RECORD

Maker:                          Date:
Products intended:
Production location:            [ ] Home  [ ] Shared/commissary  [ ] Under another's permit
Jurisdiction (state / county / city):

AUTHORITY CONTACTED
  Office:
  Person spoken to:             Date:            Phone / email:
  Question asked (verbatim):
  Answer given:

DETERMINATION
  [ ] Cottage food eligible — for these products only:
  [ ] Requires licensed facility
  [ ] Not a food business (floral)
  Revenue cap, if any:
  Required label wording, if any:

DOCUMENTS ON FILE
  [ ] Business registration            #            expires
  [ ] Health permit / license          #            expires
  [ ] Food handler / manager cert      #            expires
  [ ] Zoning or home occupation OK     #            expires
  [ ] Certificate of insurance         carrier             expires
      [ ] Todo Tasteful named as additional insured
  [ ] Resale certificate (floral wholesale)

Reviewed by:                    Date:      Re-verify on:

Every dated item gets a re-verification date. An expired permit discovered by an inspector at a corporate delivery is the worst possible way to find out.

Insurance — the network's requirement

Required before any routed job, at every rung including floral:

• General liability — someone trips over your delivery crate.
• Product liability — someone gets sick, or says they did.
• Additional insured: Todo Tasteful, on the certificate. This is standard, costs nothing to add, and is what lets the network answer a corporate buyer's procurement form.

Many venues will independently demand a certificate before they let you through the loading dock. Having one already is the difference between working the job and being turned around.

Labeling

Non-negotiable on every food item the network delivers, regardless of what the minimum legal requirement turns out to be:

• Every allergen present, called out plainly. The Big 9: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soy, sesame.
• Full ingredient list, most to least by weight.
• Maker's business name and address.
• Date made, and for TCS items, keep-refrigerated wording.
• Any disclosure your jurisdiction requires — home kitchen regimes typically mandate specific wording, verbatim.

The Standard §3 has the card format. The network's rule is stricter than most jurisdictions' minimum, deliberately: a corporate buyer has to be able to hand the card to an employee with a nut allergy and have that be the end of the conversation.

Stop conditions

Do not route work to a maker, and do not let a maker take a job, if any of these is true:

• The legal-gate record is incomplete or the authority was never actually contacted.
• Any permit, license, or certificate on file has expired.
• No current certificate of insurance.
• The product has drifted onto the TCS side of Q1 without the facility to match — the classic case being a cottage-food baker who adds a cream filling.
• The job's venue or jurisdiction differs from the one the maker is permitted in, and that has not been checked.

The last one catches people. Crossing from Maryland into DC for a delivery is a different jurisdiction, and for some permit types that matters.