This Tamale Act could throw open the door for more home kitchen entrepreneurs in Colorado

The legislation, which has passed one House committee and awaits a second committee hearing, addresses an issue at the heart of the so-called Food Freedom movement now gaining traction in Colorado and beyond: the idea that home cooks should have the right to sell food out of their own kitchens without government interference.

“We know this is happening already,” said Republican Rep. Ryan Gonzalez of Greeley, who sponsored the bill for the second time this year. “This bill aims to legalize what we see already in the streets.”

Gonzalez dubbed it the "Tamale Act" for the "tamale ladies," common in his Greeley neighborhood who offer their homemade delicacies to the public.

“Especially in my community, we have a lot of Hispanic population, and they sell burritos, tamales, tortas, ” Gonzalez said. “ I would see a tamale lady sometimes at the bank when I was working there. She would come with their trunk full of tamales just to sell them by the dozen or half dozens.”

He says the legitimacy offered in his proposal would bring those informal entrepreneurs more economic opportunity, like the means to advertise and build a strong customer base before making big business investments like leasing space in a commercial kitchen. 

“This is a policy that will be a stepping stone for cottage foods vendors to eventually start a business,” Gonzalez said. “ We want to get these people into (food) trucks, into restaurants so they can pay taxes, they can have that revenue, they can go through the licensing and the inspection, do all that stuff.”

The idea has bipartisan support and the governor’s blessing. It passed its first budget committee easily. But in this tight budget year, it’s not clear that the Tamale Act will become law because of the associated costs of regulating all those new businesses. 

Risky business

Of course, the Tamale Act isn’t just about tamales. The law opens the door for home cooks to sell other products: sauerkraut, kimchi, sausage, buttercream cakes, potato salad and casseroles, just to name a few. 

It’s a list that makes public health officials cringe. 

“It will make people sick,” said Shawna Johnson, consumer protection coordinator with Boulder County Public Health. “We will see a rise in foodborne illness. We could see illnesses like Salmonella, E. coli, or things like Norovirus.”

But it’s not just the risk of food-borne illness that gives public health officials pause. After all, Johnson said most cottage food producers never make people sick. But the bill does not provide additional funding for public health departments that simply don't have the resources or staff to respond to more food-borne outbreaks.

My team is already stretched thin,” Johnson said. “There's reduced funding. People have been laid off.”

Food-borne illness outbreaks suck up a lot of resources as public health officials respond with a small army of specialists, from food safety experts and investigators to epidemiologists and water quality teams.

“Without any resources, it would be really tough to manage,” Johnson said.

Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nonpartisan legislative staff estimate the Tamale Act would lead to two additional outbreaks a year in Colorado. But underground commerce, like illegal cottage food sales, is notoriously difficult to study, so the true risks of the legislation remain unclear.

The same could be said of the benefits, although emerging research on the cottage food industry suggests legalization can spur real entrepreneurship.

“For some subset of these businesses, they do become employers,” said Dawn Thilmany, a Colorado State University economist. “They do grow and become economically viable businesses.”

But Thilmany, who has worked with many small-scale food start-ups, pointed out that for all the good intentions of the Tamale Act, growth-minded entrepreneurs bumping up against the physical limitations of a home kitchen won’t want to remain at the cottage food level very long.

“No matter what someone's trying to do out of their home, it is very hard for people to accelerate at the level they want to until they're in one of these more sophisticated facilities where you can really have a workflow,” she said. 

Backers of the bill say that’s the point: legitimacy would give micro cottage food makers the confidence to dream bigger.

“It would give them that ‘what is next’ mentality versus the mentality that we have now, which is, ‘let me not get caught. Let me be as quiet as possible,’” Flores-Muñoz said. “Our community needs not a helping hand, but a leveled playing field to be able to get into this market, be competitive and be part of our economic system.”

Flores-Muñoz sees the possibility among his own employees, including Daniela Rodriguez, who works for Combi Taco Catering as a cook. On the side, Rodriguez sells her homemade menudo, pozole and asado, foods from her native Durango, Mexico. She said she can earn up to $400 in a weekend that way. 

“ It's good because it's more money for my household,” she said.

She said she likes the idea of outgrowing her home kitchen someday, and heading up her own legitimate business, just like her boss, but would need to find a way to build up more resources to get there.