home based food production

Pandagreen

Wonder if anyone has any experience of this. I'm thinking of starting a business involving food - cakes, chocolate etc and a friend suggested that I test my products at a carboot sale. She had heard that the legislation was different to farmers markets and that a registered kitchen etc was not required. I rang Irishcarboot.ie and they said that a licence would be necessary but they didn't seem to be too familiar with the process.


When I looked at the fsai.ie site they is mention of exemptions in the legislation for food businesses producing very small quantities of food.

Can anyone advise?

Thank you very much!

Acoshla

First step is to call your local Environmental Health Officer to arrange an inspection of your kitchen for your HSE Registration, then you will probably need product liability insurance and possibly also public to sell at markets. As far as I'm aware you need a registered kitchen to sell any food, but that can be a registered domestic kitchen, it doesn't have to be a commercial kitchen.

Pandagreen

Thanks for clearing that up Spadina. I thought it sounded a little too easy!

PCPhoto

there have been quite a number of threads on the same thing recently - looks like people think setting up a business from home is the only way to make money.

insurance is a vital part of any business and one that cripples most companies.

Pandagreen

I have heard of a number of successful businesses run from the home. I agree that insurance is high but that doesn't always mean they will fail. We need people to set up businesses to get this country back on its feet!

Acoshla

My insurance is quite reasonable thank God.

A lot of business are starting from homes these days, what annoys me is that only a fraction of the ones in my line of work are actually HSE registered, have insurance, registered with Revenue etc, as one such person said to me, she "wasn't going to go down the HSE/Insurance Route" Many people seem to think these things are optional, and those of us actually paying insurance and tax have our prices undercut by these people working in unapproved homes/kitchens.

/rant over

Pandagreen

The regulation is so important, particularly in the area of food. I think it's going to get harder for people to work outside the system. The authorities seem to be getting stricter.

I'll have to come up with another way of road testing my wares before going through all the motions of registering kitchen etc. I'm still very much at the early stages so don't want to run before I learn to walk...

Will contact the DCEB and look at doing some of their courses. Any pointers are most welcome!

Acoshla

Even if you just let EHO know that you're starting out and that you'd like to book an inspection as soon as they can there is a sort of grace period where you can do very early stuff, when I called my EHO she asked was I already up and running but I was actually just at the point of having my kitchen redone so hadn't done anything yet, but it seems to be common for people to test run a few markets/orders before deciding to go ahead with HSE stuff, and as long as they knew you intended to meet them as soon as possible you might get away with it once or twice. I know of people who have been very openly working for 12-18 months without any of the above that we've mentioned.

Pandagreen

That's very useful information. Thank you so much. Will contact the EHO and go from there.