 My name is Lisa Kivriss and we've got a couple of our farmer team on this SAIR project, Della Ence, Scotch Hill Farm and Kalina Reamer, Reamer Family Farm. A quick project overview on what this is and how we are working under a SAIR farmer rancher grants to bring more zucchini muffins in the world, not hazardous legally. Talk a little bit about cottage food, which is what's giving us this opportunity, estate specific laws that allow us to use our home kitchens versus commercial for some public sale, direct to the customer. And then Della is going to fill you in on what's been an obsession of ours for now five years of basically getting selling cookies legal in Wisconsin. So it's a story of grassroots women farmer led democracy, sugar-coated at its finest. And then Kalina, we are, we are honored to have Kalina as our guest speaker today who's going to talk a little bit about her baking in her kitchen in her farm state kitchen dreams to one day own a bakery and we are so honored to have Kalina on our team are the women on our farmer rancher team range. Well, you started when you were an elderly 12, now you're 13, right? And she has dreams of starting a bakery maybe on the farm, maybe wherever. And Linda Derickson is in her 70s and has run multiple restaurants and done all sorts of things. But I like to think that's the true collaborative spirit of Sarah is different farmers coming together and sharing knowledge and making things better. So so yeah, we love that. We love that. Then Della and I will talk a little bit more on our project specifics on ideas on pricing add on sales. Our recipes we're working on learnings and a little bit on commercial. I'll just touch on that at the end if anybody's interested happy to chat more. As I mentioned, we are under a farmer rancher grant. I got this number right FNC 18 dash 1130. We had a challenge that we thought other people had. And hey, this maybe this could be a a farmer rancher grant. So real specifically, with cottage food, I'll go more into detail, but it has to do with what's called non hazardous food. So these are basically things that are shelf stable in a very general term. It has to do with water activity, which I'll nerd out a little bit later with you. And a lot of things that would use what I'm growing on the farm wouldn't qualify. So for example, I could make chocolate chip cookies. Yeah, sure, those can sit at my market table all day. They're not hazardous, but it doesn't do any value added for my farm. I could bring zucchini muffins or pumpkin muffins. Yeah, those would be using what I'm growing. But we have found that because the water content so high on vegetables that they often don't meet the water activity number. And that's an issue. So we thought other people would want to be doing this too. So that's what made this whole proposal come together is how can we develop recipes and also display ideas. So if I'm bringing my two dozen mark muffins to market, it doesn't look like the Boy Scouts bake sale. And what we did was we put together a fabulous team. Now this is this by no means has to be all women's air grants. I mean, really, they're not women's specific at all. However, there's no reason you couldn't put together a team of your women farmers that you feel strongly about that would bring different resources to this group. So we are a fun group needless to say. So it's myself, Della, Kalina, Linda Derrickson, I mentioned. And then we have Ashley Wegmüler's doing the display stuff. And then we got the whole Reamer family by default, thanks to Kalina. So Kalina's mom, Jen, and Anna's there, and Danielle Matson with the rolling pin is a pastry chef slash homesteader that we roped in because we needed some help with frosting recipes. So the bottom line is it can be very inclusive. It can be very collaborative with different people and our case, different women contributing to create something together and needless to say we we've had a lot of fun in the process. So cottage food, this fascinates me because I'm trying to find who to give credit to this term cottage food, which really came about most of the state laws passed since 2008. And you might remember other things happened in 2008, like the Great Recession, and forward thinking states started thinking to themselves, well, what could we do to help promote economic viability? What could we do to help people become entrepreneurs easily, rather than always needing to create jobs? And that's what got this movement going. But I'd love to give that person credit for cottage food, because it totally talks about what we're talking about here at the conference, right food, and eating and sharing it and cottage the small and getting back to those local economies, because this idea of making a loaf of bread and selling it to your neighbor is about as old as commerce, right? This isn't anything new. Arguably 100 150 years ago, when we started having some food regulations for important things like meat and child labor and other things that we do want, we from my lens, sometimes ended up over regulating. And that's how we got to it to be illegal to sell cookies to your neighbor. So we're seeing things bottom line go back to that. And fundamentally, that's huge, and can really be a game changer, both economically and community wise. And we are really on the cusp of this. So all of us doing this and talking about it are pioneers in a new economy, and selling more directly local using local products. So it's exciting. It's changing it's evolving as you'll hear. But the good news is it's only changing for the better in the sense of, as new laws come up in states, they're better. I'll talk about that more, but you know, more things you can do more money, you can make, etc. So it's very collaborative. It's very sharing of ideas. And it's exceptionally women led. So Della will talk more about Wisconsin. But we there's a report that came out after we could start baking in Wisconsin, only after four months on who's doing this, it's over 90% women, a lot of stay home moms, a lot of women who have dreams of starting a full bakery. But most importantly, women who are empowered by going from hobby baker and giving everything away to I'm a food entrepreneur. And that's priceless, you know, so that's what we're talking about. We want to support. Alright, so cottage food, specific items in your home kitchen. That's what we're talking about. So the good news is not commercial, but we are talking home kitchens for specific sales venues, primarily, you'll hear me use that word increasingly now, primarily, because things are really changing. I used to say exclusively direct to your customers retail. But guess what, you can get a wholesale license out of your home kitchen in California, Iowa, Pennsylvania. So things are changing. But it's still bottom line direct to your customer, which makes sense. There's that ultimate transparency. Food products only, meaning not food service. And some folks might have come to the come and get it session we did yesterday on food service on your farm. I have some of the brochures, the manuals from that if folks are interested somewhere out there. But what we're going to focus on here is food products. So I can sell you my loaf of rye bread. If I slice it, if I slice it and make a sandwich, if I do anything with it, that is food service, ready to eat food. The products like we're talking about are regulated typically through the Department of Ag food service typically through the Department of Health, totally different beasts. So hopefully some folks came yesterday or I'm happy to chat more after but that's what we're talking about. And sales within your state only, I will add primarily. Because that again, there's state specific laws, I say primarily because increasingly, and we're working on like Wisconsin, sister states, Wisconsin and Minnesota, if you're, you know, an hour out of the cities here, if you live in Hudson, and guess what, if you follow all of Minnesota's regulations, they're okay with you bringing your rye bread to the market. And Kathy Zeman, who's here with the Minnesota Farmers Market Association can fill you in. So things are again, changing. There are generally limits on what ways you can sell and how much. So again, direct to your customer, some states not in the Midwest, some states have quirky laws like you can't advertise, but we're working on that. And how much you can make over 24 states do not have any gross sales cap, meaning bake on, but trust me, eventually your family will kick you out of your house. If you are using the kitchen that much. Some states, you know, 10 to 25,000 gross sales cap always gross. So it's the most it's the total monies you take in. And also an opportunity to really showcase local products, as you see Della there, she uses local Wisconsin grains, her own eggs, etc. It's a way to really emphasize those ingredients as we'll talk about. All right. So this is a map of cottage food laws in this country. And the general scale there is if you can see dark green is great, and it moves from there. And the definition of great is you can do more make more, be more, meaning there are more products that you can sell under that state's cottage food law, more money you can make i.e. no gross sales cap, more outlets that you can do etc. There's one, there's nobody here from New Jersey, right? There's only one gray one left. And that's New Jersey. And there's a pending lawsuit there. So yeah, in general, this is I think a game changer in that these generally have bipartisan support. They're very much proven to help generate economics, they go much beyond farmers, obviously. But it's something that we can all come together on rural urban areas, etc. And again, most of this has changed, this map keeps changing, it's on, it's dynamic in that when laws changing, hopefully things keep getting greener. Okay, so non hazardous foods is kind of a sticky kind of who wants to eat that, right? But it's a scientific term based on the food code of different definitions based on what the food is. I'm just I'm going to touch on more on the breads, but I also want to quickly touch on high acid foods. An easy way to think about this is shelf stable. But again, there's some there's science behind that you need to be aware of. For baked goods, generally the water activity level of 0.85 or under. So sometimes you hear these things described as low moisture. But that's not a good description in that moist is bad, dry is good. It has to do with how the ingredients interact together. So people ask me all the time, can I make pie? It depends. You know, can I make cake? It depends. It depends on the recipe. It depends on your ingredients and how they interact. So, you know, generally things you see there are loaves of bread. Yeah, you, you know, your gut can kind of tell you you could leave those at the market. You could leave those out at night on your counter. They're fine. cookies, things like that are generally fine. Once you start getting in a lot of I'll get more into this in the whole that thought because we'll talk more about it has to do with sugar level has to do with acidity. It has to do with other things. There's a whole lot, though, that automatically qualify as not hazardous goods that are the things that don't need refrigeration. That high acid canned items are often part of a state's cottage food law. Those would be the safer canned items. So generally the pickled items salsa's pickles, sauerkraut, that sort of thing. We have the pickle bill in Wisconsin that covers that there are sometimes they have pH requirements, but generally tested recipes that qualified high acid anything from the ball canning book or extension would be fine. Those are the general category. Some states also include things like candy or confections. It would be called dry mixes. The list keeps growing, but these are the primary two and the primary one business wise is the baked goods. So it's important to look in your own state law on what you can sell. The states we're talking about here. Yeah, baked goods. Well, Della will fill you in on baked goods. It is legal, but we don't have a law. The high acid canned items. Pennsylvania is really interesting. Pennsylvania. It's the only state in the country that you can sell jerky. So meat product, everything else we're talking about. It's pretty obvious, but you know, non hazardous, you're not leaving it. But I commend Pennsylvania because yeah, there's nothing jerky is still stable. So the more examples we have of what's succeeding in other states. So if you want to sell jerky, yeah, nudge your state representative to look at Pennsylvania, it's working there. And the interesting thing about all of this is all of these cottage food laws bless their hearts never come about due to the the visionary leadership of our elected officials. It comes to constituents like us calling them and saying, Hey, I want to sell my cookies. I want to sell my pickles. I heard in Pennsylvania, you could do jerky. Can we do that too? So it's great. It's very activist based where you can sell your products. Sometimes these are specific. It's always direct to customer, except in those states you can do wholesale direct to customers. Some states do have regulations on the where right now in Wisconsin, for example, the pickle bill, you can only sell at public venues. We're trying to change that, but it's weird. Like you can only take your pickles to the farmer's market. But if you want to order pickles for me, we would technically need to do something at the farmer's market. That said, in general still laws are in regs are sometimes written a little generally in the pickle bill, it talks about you can sell at social events. You define that sometimes. Sometimes it's not so much this. Yeah, most for the most part internet sales are fine. But something to ask how are you allowed to sell? Sometimes there are specifics on the packaging. But in general, they leave that up to the food producer and how much we're talking about gross sales cap. And that's our sprylinda D. You saw but yeah, you can, there is legislation on the high acid side. And the Minnesota Farmers Market Association has great resources for anybody in Minnesota on both the baking and the can side. There's a little couple more quirks with Minnesota and canned items, but it's fine. But then I mentioned California, you can do wholesale. They don't allow high acid canned items at all in the state of California. And like anything fermented or fresh? No, because that would be refrigerated and that would be commercial refrigeration. Okay, so Della is going to share a little on our journey here in Wisconsin. Yeah, this was an interesting journey to say the least. Wisconsin was the other gray state when you saw the map. We were 48, 49 in the country to get this baking loss. So and we only got it two years ago. So and it's not done yet. 2013 starting to seem like a long time ago. And that's when we were naive. And we thought as members of the Farmers Union, this is going to be a piece of cake. And we went to the State House and we talked to legislators, Republicans and Democrats, everybody was like, Yeah, this is a great idea. We have the pickle bill. We'd like to have the cookie bill. We'll support it. So we had bipartisan support. And we went to a Farmers Union convention all pumped up. We made our signs. Thank you. Thank you. Only find out. It didn't happen. It didn't come up for a vote on the House floor. So we're like, Okay, you have to wait a year. The next year, go back again, back again, reintroduced it. Same thing happened. We were approached by Institute for Justice, which is a really wonderful law firm, Libertarian law firm, sticking up for small businesses and the right to make a decent living. And so they said, Would you sign on to this lawsuit and we'll help you sue the state of Wisconsin, because we think this is unconstitutional. And so we were like, Well, okay. And it seemed like that was going to be easy too. But it wasn't quite as easy as it seemed like. And they were wonderful. We did get, we got national press, we got a lot of attention into the state with the help of Institute for Justice and the judge goes, Yeah, okay, he ruled it was unconstitutional. And we're like, Hey, but it was unconstitutional only for Chris, Della, and Lisa, the plaintiffs, the plaintiffs give the all the rest of the court when they go we rule for the play. Yeah, right. That's how the state interpreted it. Right. So fighting it only Lisa, Della and Chris can make. So we were like, Wait a minute, that wasn't the purpose of this, we're doing this for everybody. So we had to go back to court again, and get that clarified. But that was a real shocker when that happened. Wait, so we did go back and in October, then the judge said, No, no, it's for everybody. Then we go back, because we won this case, right? But there's no rules. There's no rules. And that cap doesn't still know what the rules are, other than we're selling non hazardous baked goods in Wisconsin. So it's fully legal to bake. We have a judge's ruling that lifted the ban on the sale of home baked goods, but we do not have a law because the bill never passed. You sense the confusion. So for anybody in Wisconsin, Wisconsin Cottage food dot com is a site we set up through the Wisconsin Farm Machine. All right, so now we'll talk more on the bakery side. So we were talking about deciding what to produce what fits under your state's food law. Right now, we're going to shift more towards the baking side. What do you have in abundance? What's there an outlet for? What would be a niche and be unique? And importantly, what meets the non hazardous definition? And that's what we've been focusing on. This project is recipes that meet that. So I mentioned briefly before, water activity definition. This has to do with microbes developing within a product. So it has to do with how much water is active, literally. And there is a federal number of point 85 or less. And that's what we're operating under Wisconsin, even though we have a bit of a free for all as we were talking about, we don't want to be free for all we want to be safe. So that's what you'll see on the Wisconsin Farmers Union site is Yeah, let's go with the federal. Sometimes you see this a little different per state. Sometimes it is a little lower. It wouldn't be higher. And just for example, I put some other foods out there. So you can see kind of comparisons. It has to do again with the moisture. Now, I just want to mention one thing that we're not going into. But if you have specific recipes, bottom line, you can have them tested. You'll see what we've been doing in a second. But there's another factor of here of pH level. So sometimes if pH level is a certain amount and it interacts with the water, you could still be non hazardous. So when I was talking earlier, it's not moist as bad and dry is good. Lemon bars are technically non hazardous because you have the acidity from the lemon and the sugar. Sugar is key. Pecan pie is non hazardous. Most fruit pies, apple pie, a traditional apple pie would be non hazardous. Clearly, it's moist. Clearly, it's good. Sometimes that has to do with the pH. And there's some other tests you could do, but we were trying to keep it simple. Now, going back to our SARE project, this is kind of what Beth, you correct me. What this is supposed to do is put you in areas that you would never go that will hopefully make some things better for everybody. I'm not a food scientist. I like to grow things and bake them. And all of a sudden, I'm in my community college science lab talking to the professors there about water activity and they're showing me how to use this meter and and and totally out of my box. But you know, I learned something. It's interesting. I can share it. And that's what these are all about. So OK, so we've been working on these recipes, some things we've learned. And our final toolkit with all these recipes is going to we're finalizing it, literally speaking. It'll be out. We're going to launch it at the Moses Conference. We'll probably have it ready, though, into November, December. And I have a signup sheet here so we can be sure to send you the link for it. But one thing we're learning is like with zucchini, for example, is squeezing the water out. It sounds obvious, but we have these techniques we figured out where you put a little salt on the shredded zucchini and you let it sit for a bit and the water comes out. And then we've tweaked the recipes so there's enough oil. There's enough other things. So it's not dry. We want these things to taste good, bottom line. We've also learned, though, that adding dry additions like raisins or chocolate chips, those absorb the moisture and those are good if you want to meet non-hazardous levels. Except for the tomatoes. Except for tomatoes. We've been having a hard time with sun-dried tomatoes. Sugar in generally is good, which irks Linda on our team because she's like the hippie health nut as she calls herself. Do you know? But sugar helps with the non-hazardous water activity levels. And so I mentioned the community college. Typically these, there's labs, food safety labs that do these tests. I'll show you an example. Typically they're like about 35 bucks, which is not a lot. I mean, we've been testing a lot of recipes and I didn't want to give them more money out of our grant than we had to. So hence I learned that your community college, they will have a water activity test in the lab. And community college, you should be able to bring your stuff over there and test it. And at least get a baseline before you're spending at a lab. Most community colleges, like mine, are not certified. So you still would need a certified lab for your recipe if you're looking at something specific. This is the test. So Debal labs in Madison. And you see there, we did zucchini muffins, pumpkin muffins, and cream cheese frosting. And there's the number. So point, they're all under 0.85. This is what's going to be on the website. So anyone using these recipes, you can download this, bring it to your market. You are good to go. So that's the quick thing on my food science education thanks to there. But it's not a big process. And I keep, if people ask, the easiest thing is just have your recipe tested. You know, people keep asking, can I do this? Can I do that? I don't really know because what we're learning too is it's not just the ingredients. It's the brands of ingredients, you know, and butters are all different, right? Flowers are all different. Flowers are all different. So we've been, for this project, consistent in that we are using this organic valley butter. We are using this varietal of pumpkin, et cetera. So at least we're consistent and you may need to take it another level. So other learnings we've been having have to do with pricing. And as we were joking, you can't sell a $20 muffins, you know, in that we want to prioritize quality ingredients. We want to prioritize how much time goes into something. And that's what we've been tweaking is the economics of it. So the ingredient, so bottom on your kitchen and ingredient costs are now a business expense, which is something different to think about, especially if you're just used to raising it. It does open some opportunity. I'll talk more about it at the end, but at the homemade for sale book I did goes into more of the detail on cottage food business startups and pricing and that sort of thing. But for a lot of folks, particularly those women I was talking about who went from stay at home mom cookie hobbyist to food entrepreneur. This is a change of all of a sudden your receipts from, you know, Michaels for your add-ons are our business expense, etc. So creating cost effective packaging. We will have a sourcing list. Ashley on our team has done all things that are compostable or made out of recycled products. So different bags and that sort of thing. Keeping ingredient costs in check. So we have several recipes. I'm working on one of Della's. It uses eggplant. It's like a chocolate cupcake with eggplant. And if I didn't tell you eggplant was in there, you wouldn't even know it. It's nice and moist. Also has a lot of sugar. The original recipe used the squares of unsweetened baking chocolate. And we calculated like with quality organic ingredients, the ingredients alone were a dollar a muffin. It wouldn't fly. So we're testing those now with cocoa. So a dry cocoa, even sustainable fair trade is a lot cheaper. And generally, oh, let's start back to the packaging is you can create cost effective packaging creatively. So these are the rye breads I do. I'm not a very I'm not a very good bread baker, but I have learned to make sourdough Latvian rye bread. Latvia where my mom immigrated from and my dad's from Estonia. The Baltics like rye breads are religion, you know. So it's a thing. So I have been practicing. It's a sweet sour, salbska myza. It's a rye bread. And you know, we got we were testing these packaging. So these are like the cellophane bags. Again, no saran wrap, no ziploc bags, the label. And it was flat. And I happen to have all of these just ribbons we've collected over the years. So I tie it now. So that's the Latvian flag. Now in Wisconsin, that often gets confused with Bucky Badger. It is not Bucky Badger. It is the Latvian flag colors on my bread. It gives me a story. It gives me something to talk about. It's super cheap, but it adds something. And those are the kind of elements when it looks classy and you have to charge a little more. People are a little more willing to part with the money. And you know, I use organic flour, which is more expensive and that makes the bread taste a whole lot better. But the packaging is key, which I'm not very good at. It is and it catches people's eye and they're like, oh, seven dollars for that loaf. Yeah, that would. Yeah, nice gift or whatever. So just a few little tricks like that will help you get a little more return. And in general, at least from the pricing perspective, things smaller and cuter. People will pay money for that. So that there is a pumpkin muffin. I'm having a hard time with muffins because I mean, we run this bed and breakfast. I make muffins, I love muffins, but muffins are not a big seller at the market. They're just kind of, oh, muffins. But you put that same muffin in a little mini bun pan and you put a little frosting on it. You put it, you know, it sells. It's the same thing. Now it looks like a cake. It looks like a little cake. It looks like a little cake. And we are very excited. Danielle Mattson on our team who's the pastry chef has four really good frosting recipes, all non-hazardous. So you can use those. However, one is a cream cheese frosting that I just eat with a spoon. But, but again, a little coating of that goes a long way. So yeah, Wilton, we've been working with them. They sent some samples. They do a ton of this stuff now, do you know? And it's the little pipe type parts. It's a challenge of how much time you put to do one of these. I mean like something like this, for example, to make a pie crust and Anne takes a whole lot more time than putting muffin batter in here. But depends on your market. And you can get cute little silicon ones from Target. They're really cheap. And might I add again, ladies, these are business expenses now, you know? So those things you kind of justified as hobbies can work legitimately into your farm business. So the other thing, so we started thinking a little too of, all right, in addition to using our farm-raised produce in the actual baked good product, how can we use all this to bottom line sell what we grow? And so we started thinking about how can we use baked goods to sell our veggies? So for example, we have recipes for, it's just a crostini. You know, it's like a French bread, but you toast it. And then we have a recipe, they'll be a recipe card, of a basic dip, you know, very hazardous mayo, sour cream, that sort of thing, but it uses four cups of chopped vegetables. So you could sell the crostini, here's your bag of crostini, oh, and by the way, here's the recipe, buy my vegetables, make this dip at home. Same thing, a pie shell. So you can't sell quiche, but you can sell the pie shell in a tin, that's non-hazardous, with a recipe for the quiche and buy these veggies, and you're good to go. So we started getting creative there, because again, we had a little time and space to do this. And some of these recipes were really frustrating us. We haven't nailed rhubarb, and I'm really annoyed, but I think rhubarb just has too much water in it. So what are some other ideas? And it got us thinking. Same thing, like buns for brats or with the reamer's meats. If you're selling meats, your baked goods could complement the meats, and people need those together. So it's kind of a little, almost meal kitty, but from a different way. And also to making things creative. These, a lot of folks, I'm again, not a big bread baker, so these were new to me. These are banatones. So they're bamboo. Typically, you can order them online and you let bread rise in here. So they have patterns on them. This is pretty basic, but there's all sorts of different ones. You pop the bread out of there. I mean, it looks like Panera Plus. It's gorgeous. And that's again, what people are expecting at market is the really beautiful loaves. And how can you do it easy? And yeah, charge a premium for that. So those are the kind of things we're talking about. We wanted to, though, since we're all about diversification, touch on some other things that are a little even more out of the box, but still involve legal baked goods and integrating them into your farm business. So, Della's going to talk about, I mean, so both Della and I run Farm, Stay, Bed, and Breakfasts on our place. And in this case, we are baking these same kind of things, but we're serving them to people. So it's a great opportunity, educational opportunity for your guests to teach them about your farm and let them taste those wonderful things. They've already bought it when they paid for their room. But they might buy more to take home. If you make enough. If they don't eat it all for breakfast. We had been running this bed and breakfast for 10 years. I had a little sign in the kitchen, fresh produce available. We talked about it on the farm tour. And I think in 10 years, I sold $10 worth of produce. It wasn't clicking. Then I basically have an order form in the room with everything. Everything on the farm and just highlight what's available. I just use straight retail pricing from Willy Street Co-op. Custom harvest, let me know the night before. I have what I'm serving for the next morning for muffins. So if they want a dozen pumpkin muffins, I can make them. Place your order. I mean, now I'm averaging $40, $50 per guest if they stay two nights on orders from that. Because I mean, I'm making it easy. So it's another way to add the baked goods into your farm business. Holiday pop-ups is I do some of my best sales at these Christmas markets. And that's a perfect place for baked goods. People are having holiday meals and they want to buy it. They want gifts. So those are super good places, not just for the baked goods, but for here- That was what we did locally just last Sunday. With her canned goods. So, and they're one-shot deals. I'm not a weekly market person. I don't like that. I don't like it. But the pop-up markets work for the baked goods. So as we're saying, you're not wholesale, but under the not-a-caterer butt. You know, there's ways to do things. So for example, as long as you are taking the sale directly, what are other options for sales? So for example, our local friend Anna Landmark runs- She's a cheese maker. She has a shop, a creamery. It's a retail shop. I cannot sell her my muffins. However, they have a holiday market weekend in Paley, a cute little tourist town. I go into her shop. I have my market table. It's like a little mini-farmers market in her store. And I can sell direct to the customers. And I can give her a percentage of that or whatever. But it's one of those win-wins where she's not doing baked goods. People are coming in. It adds value to her store. She's got traffic. And it's totally legit. But I have to physically be there. So some people ask about like consignment or things. And that's great. I wouldn't go there. And the not-a-caterer butt. So going back to what you were talking about before, food service. You can't slice that bread and put it on a plate. However, I cannot control what somebody does with something after they buy it from me. So any opportunity, especially these cute things, to sell at market in a very easy way that somebody could just eat it on the way back. Now, I wouldn't put a fork with anything. That's food service. That could have the health department calling. But cupcakes, cake pops. There's a woman I write about in the Farmstead, the homemade for sale book, Regina Dyslowski. She's a farm route in New York. She does jams and jellies. And she does these beautiful artisan breads, right? So folks come to the market. They buy their bread from the week. She does little individual focacias. And they're just in a bag. You think any of those focacias go home? No, no. So again, not a caterer butt. If the local law firm in Monroe calls me and says, hey, Lisa, we would love to have two dozen muffins every Friday for our staff meeting. Yeah. You know, I go. I drop them off. It's done. I'm not doing napkins. I'm not doing butter. I'm not sitting there saying, how do you like me? So those kind of things are ways to do that. The other thing too is wedding favors. So what are markets where there's a high premium value and increasingly now with the whole wedding barns and Farmstead chic weddings, this idea of having 200 of something to give to all of your guests to go home on. I've only personally known a handful of farmers who've been able to tap into this. But with it growing, I think it's got a lot of opportunity. And that's a win-win. If somebody wants 200 of my little pumpkin bunt cakes, and I know about it months ahead of time, and they're paying five bucks a pop, and I put a custom label on it, and, and, and. Yeah. You know, that's a great way to, again, diversify this business mix. Am I going to do that every weekend? No. But if I could get a handful of those over the course of the summer, you bet. So again, they're not reselling them. They're giving them away. That's all, all fine. Okay. We want to touch quick on scaling up just, just for some food for thought if anyone's interested. So what we're talking about up to now is home kitchens. Some places have a gross sales cap you might exceed. Your family might kick you out. What are other options? The first one before building anything is renting a commercial kitchen space. So increasingly urban areas, and that can be a challenge for some of us, have incubator community commercial kitchen spaces. And Madison feed kitchen is awesome. It's a nonprofit. You walk in there. They walk you through your business startup. What licensing do you need? You could be selling wholesale to the co-op. But, you know, it's an hour and a half for me, and my bread takes two days to rise. It's not an option. Church kitchens, we were talking about this at the session yesterday. Maybe. And that. Licensed. Yeah, some church kitchens are licensed commercially. However, unless you are a member of that church, it's complicated. I've yet to find a lot of churches who are openly marketing it. But if you are part of the church community and they know you, and you know the kitchen's licensed for baked goods, and again, each kitchen has different licenses, it's a much more complicated route. Same thing with restaurants, off hours. It's an option. It is an option to think about. I mean, in general, a commercial bakery is, I will use it in big quotes, somewhat simpler than other commercial kitchens because you're baking. You're not refrigerating. It's different than if you were having a restaurant kitchen and making ceviche and ground beef fritters. So it is, we've had farms by us who have had a commercial bakery on site. It's a separate room. It fits obviously the regulations. It's something to look into potentially, but it's still an investment. But that said, you might be like, Dorothy Steinbrook here in Minnesota, where you build a non-farm commercial kitchen. So in her case, she is an organic berry farmer, was bringing her berries to the Twin City area markets. And at the time, her daughter was in high school on the swim team, eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And you know, as any mom, you get a little creative. She's like, well, why am I buying all this jelly? I'm a berry farmer. I can make jam. So in Dorothy's other life, she was a bartender. And who knew Merlot went so well with blueberries? You know, she's got an interesting product that is selling. And she capped the, at the time, Minnesota gross sales capped of like 15,000. So she needed a commercial kitchen. She rented for a while at the local church. Again, a canning kitchen is a little simpler, but she was schlepping all these jars. She was schlepping all this fruit. And most importantly, she was off-farm where she didn't want to be. So she ended up building a commercial on-site kitchen, separate building, cost about 50,000. But now, look her up. And look her up on all of the Good Food Awards. She's won a bunch of different things. The Good Food Awards are like the Emmys of food artisan businesses. It's every January in San Francisco. So check it out, because it's interesting things to see what kind of food businesses. And she's gone to town and fully credits the cottage food opportunities for giving her those training wheels to test things out. So with that, we're going to turn things over to Kalina. Well, hi. Yeah, I really enjoy baking. So Lisa asked me to just say a couple things. Like what I look for in a recipe and why I like baking and ways I think outside the box when I'm baking. First of all, make sure you look at how long the recipe takes because I have gotten halfway through the recipe ready to put it in the oven and then realize that it takes half hour longer than I have. So make sure you've got the time. Otherwise, it's just a lot of wasted ingredients or you don't have a dish to pass. And make sure that the ingredients, our ingredients you want to eat, like no really gross ingredients, make sure they're local and you know where they came from and not like super, super sugary stuff. And try unique ingredients like fruits and flowers. Put flowers in there and pair them up together and see what tastes good and what doesn't. And I like baking because it's a good way just to like decompress at the end of the day. And I like baking and giving it to people and it's just a quick, easy gift to give to people. And it's like a science experiment. Like you just put all the ingredients together and it's like formulas and see what happens and if the outcome works or not. And then I really like thinking outside the box and using ingredients that some people don't even know are edible. Like nettles and dandelions and lamb quarters and violets. I made a violet shortbread. Over the summer and you can use dried violets or and dried lavender but if you do you can use the flowers and go out and just like pick the flowers and put them in the recipe. So I literally went out into my yard and picked flowers out in my yard and put them in my cookies. So I really like baking and that is a couple of reasons why.