How I Opened a Bread Workshop in the US for 2,000 Yuan
To ensure my family could enjoy wholesome carbohydrates, I spent several years learning to bake sourdough using a natural wild yeast starter. Over these years, I have often shared my loaves with friends or brought them to potlucks, consistently receiving plenty of praise.
I particularly remember last Thanksgiving, when I was invited to dinner at my American farmer friend Nancy’s house. During the meal, a guest couldn’t stop raving about my sourdough: “I’d have to rein myself in, or I’d finish the whole lot in one sitting!”
This greatly boosted my confidence in my baking. I took the time to look into the relevant regulations in my home state of Texas and prepared to start the business.
I. Setting up a bakery for under 2,000 RMB
Cottage food legislation varies considerably from state to state. In California, known for its high taxes and stringent regulations, you must obtain a special licence to run a food workshop. The specific licence category depends on the business scope and turnover thresholds.
For instance, a Class A licence permits direct sales to consumers, with an annual cap of $80,000 (roughly ¥565,000). If you intend to supply third parties such as supermarkets or restaurants, you must apply for a Class B licence, which limits annual turnover to $160,000 (approximately ¥1.131m).
The most lenient framework is found in Wyoming, a vast, sparsely populated state with a strong cowboy heritage. There, homemade foods can be sold without a licence, there are no restrictions on retailing through third parties, and the annual sales limit reaches as high as $250,000 (around ¥1.767m).
The regulations in my home state of Texas are also fairly relaxed, requiring no licence. Baked goods can be sold to consumers provided they contain no meat, and the packaging clearly lists the ingredients, allergens, and the owner’s home address and contact details. Although there is an annual turnover cap of $60,000, this is more than adequate for a home-based workshop.
I then spent just over $200 (around £155) on a printer and labels for my food packaging, a large stack of kraft paper bags for my sourdough, and spent some time designing a logo and menu. With that, my home bakery was officially open for business.
All in all, selling homemade food in the United States isn’t difficult.
II. Rebuilding a Local Food System
All my baked goods are leavened with a natural sourdough starter. During the long, natural fermentation process, a diverse and active microbial culture develops rich, complex flavours. It also breaks down antinutrients and gluten in the flour, making the nutrients far easier for the body to absorb.
Opening this bakery served several purposes. As a homemaker whose primary focus is caring for my family, the operation provides me with additional income. But as someone who cares deeply about food provenance and quality, my long-term aim is to build a local organic food exchange network. Running this organic sourdough bakery, supplying high-quality artisan bread to the local community, and helping to improve the local food landscape all align with that vision.
Since opening for business, my bakery has steadily grown its local customer base in ways I never anticipated.
Susan chimed in: “I’ll take a loaf too; your bread is wonderful! I’ve never cared for supermarket bread, but I could eat yours all the time.”
From then on, I brought two loaves on every visit. At checkout, Susan would simply deduct the price of the bread from what I owed for the meat, eggs, dairy, and vegetables I bought from the farm. This method of exchange felt closer to a simple barter system, and it left me feeling truly happy and satisfied. This equitable food exchange system is precisely what I have long sought to build.
III.“This food has not been inspected by the health department”
“This food was prepared in a home kitchen and has not been inspected by the health department.”
The legal requirement to print this statement on packaging reflects a longstanding American negotiation between food safety and individual liberty: if we demand absolute safety, food production will inevitably become entirely industrialised; but if we prioritise liberty over safety, we inevitably leave room for opportunists to exploit loopholes.
Affixing this disclaimer to a food label is an art of balance. It signifies informed, voluntary consent: the act of purchase forms a de facto contract between buyer and seller, making regulatory intervention in this private transaction unnecessary. If you remain uneasy about foods that have not undergone official inspection, you are free to simply head to a fully licensed supermarket or commercial bakery.
Those who produce and prepare our food are minimum-wage labourers trapped within the capitalist supply chain; the owners of large-scale food manufacturers are profiteers focused on squeezing costs to maximise returns. Stricter regulation, alongside more ‘standardised’ and assembly-line food production, merely raises the barrier to entry for small-scale producers. Whether judged by safety or nutritional standards, this approach ultimately yields poorer-quality food.
A few years ago, I came across a domestic news report about a farmer in Chongqing who sold homemade steamed pork with glutinous rice. A local court ordered him to refund all sales and pay the buyers ten times the purchase price in compensation. I was struck to discover that the majority of online commenters voiced sympathy for the farmer.
It may well be that an increasing number of people are beginning to recognise that modern food safety issues are a by-product of urbanisation and technological advancement.
As consumers, we are drifting ever further from the origins of our food. The rural ways and close-knit community living that once sustained us have faded into history. Those who grow and prepare our food are strangers to those who eat it, and consumers need know nothing of who is behind the scenes. This growing distance between us and our food has not inspired any sense of wonder; rather, it has given rise to a host of food safety concerns.
IV. What Kind of Food Laws Do We Need?
If a bakery cannot start as a micro-scale home operation, but must instead meet commercial kitchen standards from day one, it demands an initial investment of tens of thousands of dollars from the entrepreneur: the kitchen must comply with health department regulations on sink provisions, commercial-grade large ovens must be purchased, and if there is a storefront, customer facilities such as toilets and parking spaces must also be provided…
If food regulations only permit large, ‘standardised’ bakeries to operate, it is easy to imagine how difficult it would be for a small-scale maker with a genuine passion for food to get off the ground.
Joel Salatin, often dubbed the ‘father of the US organic farming movement’, wrote a book titled *Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal*. As a small-scale organic farmer, Salatin strongly opposes US government interference in free transactions between private individuals.
In the book, he asks: ‘If I want to buy a cake baked in my neighbour’s kitchen, and I trust her, why does the government get to say no? It is legal to go to Walmart and buy a cheap, mass-produced cake, but illegal to buy a fresh cake made with natural ingredients in my neighbour’s kitchen. What kind of world is this?’
Homemade food laws in the United States reflect not only the public’s pursuit of food sovereignty, but also a serious civic and political stance: do community members have the right to take responsibility for their own choices and their own health, accepting certain risks in exchange for personal rights and freedoms, or should they rely on sprawling public organisations to regulate everything, tax everything, and control every aspect of daily life?
Historically, all food in the world was what we might now call ‘informal, uncertified goods’. Our obsession with ‘official’ and ‘standardised’ is, in fact, a product of technological advancement and the continuous deterioration of our food environment. We constantly hope to solve problems with more regulation and technology, yet we forget that what we often truly need is to take a step back and recreate the food exchange systems of the past:
most of people’s food is locally sourced; producers and consumers know and trust one another;
food is treated as precious nourishment for the body, rather than a weapon of finance or war;
food is not a tool for a privileged few to amass wealth and float public companies, but a means for farmers and small-scale artisans to earn a dignified livelihood through honest labour.
A world without avenues for ordinary people to sell their homemade food strikes me as a Kafkaesque absurdity, much like the reality depicted in *The Trial*. We must not wait until food production and preparation are confined exclusively to factory assembly lines before we realise it is too late.
Editor: Zain