Plenty of good food businesses started with a table at a market and a domestic oven. The cooking is rarely what stops them. The paperwork is, mostly because nobody explains it until something goes wrong.
One caveat before anything else. Food rules are national, sometimes local, and they change. What follows is the shape of the thing, not legal advice. Check the specifics with your own food safety authority or council before you take money, and do it early. They are generally helpful, and the conversation is free.
Register before you sell
Almost everywhere, selling food regularly makes you a food business, whether you cook in a commercial unit or your own kitchen. That means registering with the relevant authority.
In the UK you register with your local council; it is free, it cannot be refused, and it should be done at least 28 days before you start trading. Elsewhere in Europe the equivalent is a notification to the national food safety authority, sometimes through the municipality. In the United States it varies state by state, with "cottage food" laws setting out which products can be made at home and which cannot.
Registration usually brings an inspection at some point. That is a normal part of trading, not an accusation.
Learn the hygiene basics properly
A Level 2 food hygiene course, online, costs very little and takes an afternoon. It is not always legally required, but inspectors expect the knowledge and it answers most of the questions you would otherwise guess at.
What matters in practice: separating raw from ready-to-eat, temperature control through cooking, cooling and storage, cleaning and disinfection as two different actions, pest control, and keeping written records. The records feel like busywork until an inspection, when they are the whole difference between a good rating and a bad one.
Allergens are not the place to improvise
In the UK and EU, fourteen allergens must be declared, and the rules differ by how the food is sold.
- Loose or made to order (a cake cut at a stall): allergen information must be available and accurate, and you must be able to give it. Many traders keep a clearly signed folder on the table.
- Prepacked for direct sale (packed on your premises before the customer orders, sold at the same place): a full ingredient list on the label with allergens emphasised, plus the product name. In the UK this is Natasha's Law, in force since October 2021.
- Prepacked for sale elsewhere (a shop, a market you are not present at, post): full labelling, including ingredients, allergens, weight, storage, a date mark, and your business name and address.
Get this right on paper before the first batch. Cross-contamination in a shared home kitchen is a real limitation, and the honest answer, stated plainly, is better than a hopeful one.
Start with food that is easy to sell safely
Low-risk products are the sensible beginning: biscuits, brownies, breads, cakes without fresh cream, jams and chutneys at correct sugar or acid levels, chocolates, dry mixes. They keep at room temperature and forgive a lot.
Anything chilled is a step up: fresh cream, cheesecake, cooked meat, fish, rice dishes, anything with a short use-by. All of it is doable, but it needs temperature control in the kitchen, on the journey and on the stall, plus a thermometer and a log.
The unglamorous checklist
- Insurance. Public liability and product liability. Most markets will not let you trade without it, and you would not want to anyway.
- Traceability. Keep supplier receipts and note which batch used what. If an ingredient is recalled, you need to know which of your products it touched.
- Date marks. Use by for safety on perishable things, best before for quality. They are not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one is a compliance problem.
- Transport. Cool boxes with proper packs, a covered stall, and a plan for a hot day.
- Household separation. Pets out of the kitchen while you work, ingredients stored separately from family food, and a realistic answer about the shared oven.
- Tax and records. Declare the income from the first sale. Keep every receipt from the start; reconstructing a year later is miserable.
Price it so you actually get paid
The most common failure here is not hygiene. It is pricing at ingredients plus a bit, which quietly values the cook at nothing and makes growth impossible, because more orders simply mean more unpaid hours.
Count ingredients at true yield, packaging, labels, stall or platform fees, transport, a share of energy, and your hours at a rate you would accept from someone else. If the resulting price feels too high for the market, the answer is a different product or a different channel, not a smaller wage.
Start narrow
One product, done extremely well, sells better than eight done adequately, and it is far easier to cost, label, produce and carry. Add the second thing when the first one is boring you, not before.