Today, the home based food business is going through a renaissance, with local and artisan foods becoming extremely popular from urban to rural locations. And, there is a push to make food selling restrictions more friendly to home based food business owners. One of our sister sites has a general article on the home based food business, which offers a template from start to finish and covers ways to find customers, legalities, and so forth.

But this page adds extra information for the farming home based food business where you'll be growing or raising at least part of the ingredients for your value-added food product.

Some real life farm home based food business successes:

The titles, Micro Eco-Farming and The New Agritourism have numerous stories of rural and micro farm home based food business successes. Favorites include The Chile Man, who produces world cuisine sauces and marinades on his micro farm in Virginia and sells them to the world, and earns what he calls a "white collar salary" for his family.

Another is the Freund Farm in Connecticut, which started its home based food business by putting out surplus vegetables from the garden on a make-shift roadside stand, which led into adding baked goods and local dairy products… which led into an on-farm food store earning six digits.

Food products made and sold by farmers include dried herbal tea blends, salad mixes, barbecue smoke herbs, salsas, pies, artisan breads, artisan cheeses, handcrafted farm-label soda pop, cookies, and much more.

Possible resources of interest:

Need labels for your home made food products? Here's an affiliate link to My Own Labels which specializes in beautiful labels for artisan food entrepreneurs.

Need professional home chef products? One good outlet is Katom Restaurant Supply. They sell to both the restaurant chef and the home hobby or home food business chef.

If you need wholesale tea bags, tins, bottles, jars, muslin bags, bulk organic herbs and so on for your home based food products, we highly recommend our affiliate Mountain Rose Herbs. This long established company has promoted organics, recycling and fair trade for a very long time.

One of our favorite uses for this company is blending local North American island tea herbs with organic and fair trade exotic herbs such as South African red bush from Mountain Rose Herbs, to make a tea blend that links the continents. Click on "products."

Get free help from the county extension service

Besides your local health department, your county extension service should be able to help farmers set up an on-farm home based food business by helping them with local regulations, possible market outlets, and for those who need a certified kitchen to produce their product if you won't be making the food product itself in your own home kitchen. More and more rural counties are setting up kitchens just for this purpose. Farmers call any product they make from their crops a "value-added product," so your extension agent may use those terms when discussing the possibility of dried, canned, baked, and other products your farm produces from its crops.

Be flexible and keep going

Remember there's a push to make regulations for selling home made foods more friendly while still keeping the public and business owner safe. When you call your country extension and health department, you may find out about a variety of regulations, such as that certain canned foods can't be sold unless made in an inspected certified kitchen. If your canned beans can't be sold in the manner you were hoping, check into canned tomato goods which often don't have as many restrictions because of their natural acid content, or other foods you could produce from your farm. Some foods have stronger restrictions than others.

Stay safe

You may want to consider setting up your home based food business under a separate business entity to help protect assets. Be sure to consult a business attorney about this and liability coverage. To help cut down on attorney costs, some people first contact their health department, their county extension, and the free business advisors at S.C.O.R.E. (score.org) who give them a wealth of information on the home based food business regulations and concerns in their location, all for free, so you can better streamline your questions and know just what to ask when it comes for paying for an attorney's time.