Starting a food business

The regulatory path is more navigable than people expect. The economics are harder than people expect.

This is an outline of how the pieces fit together, not legal or business advice. Rules change and enforcement varies — confirm everything current with the relevant agency before committing money.

You cannot cook at home

This is the first thing that stops people. New York State has a home processor exemption allowing certain low-risk shelf-stable products — some baked goods, jams, certain confections — to be made in a home kitchen for sale, under registration and with specific limits.

It does not cover most of what people want to make. Anything refrigerated, anything with meat or dairy, anything acidified or canned outside the exemption, and most prepared food falls outside it. For those you need a licensed commercial kitchen.

Commercial kitchen space

The usual route is a shared or incubator kitchen — a licensed commercial facility rented by the hour or the shift, with storage. Several operate across the boroughs, aimed specifically at small producers who cannot justify their own space.

What to check before signing anything: hourly rate and minimum commitment, storage included (dry, refrigerated, frozen — cold storage is the usual bottleneck), equipment available, access hours, and whether the facility's own licensing covers what you intend to make.

Licences and permits

Depending on what you are doing, you may need some combination of:

• A business entity registered with the state, and an EIN
• A sales tax certificate of authority from the state
• NYS Department of Agriculture and Markets food processing licensing, for manufacturing shelf-stable products
• NYC Department of Health permits, for food service, retail and temporary events
• A food protection certificate — the city's food handler course, required for a supervisor on site
• Market-specific permits for temporary events, which the market operator will usually specify

Which apply depends heavily on the product and the channel. The city and state both run small-business assistance services that will walk through it for free, and using them is worth more than reading forum posts.

Selling

The usual progression is weekend markets first, then wholesale into shops and cafés, then either a permanent stall or a lease. Farmers' markets have their own application processes and — for producer-only markets like Greenmarket — their own eligibility rules about what you make and where.

The honest part

Margins on small-batch food are thin and the labour is heavy. The businesses that survive tend to have either a genuinely differentiated product or a wholesale relationship that provides a stable base, and usually both. Very few of them made money in the first two years.