Home-cooked food marketplace Foodnome announced today it has received approval for its first Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation (MEHKO) in the San Francisco Bay Area. Called Bao House, the virtual restaurant will have its grand opening this Thursday, at which point its menu will be available through the Foodnome platform.
Bao House Chef Akshay Prabhu, who is also CEO and founder of Foodnome, has been a part of the home-cooked food delivery market since 2014, though laws have prevented him from taking his various initiatives too far. The passing of the Home Restaurant Bill (AB 626) in 2018, now makes it legal to sell homemade food in California, paving the way for platforms like Foodnome.
Users of Foodnome can browse and order available meals from home chefs, then pick them up at a time and place designated by that chef. (The full address is not disclosed until after the customer completes their purchase.) So far, the marketplace serves a few different locations in California, including Riverside, Davis, Moreno Valley, and, now, Berkeley.
Presence from other states could soon follow, since Utah passed its own MEHKO-focused bill recently and there is pending legislation in New York and Washington states.
Foodnome says that in Riverside County, which was the first place to opt into AB 626, it has helped more than 150 home chefs with planning, permitting, and marketing their businesses. Home chefs must follow a rigorous set of steps in order to get approval to cook and sell food from their own kitchens, including submitting their SOPs to health departments, getting a kitchen inspection, passing an exam, and paying a permit fee. Being on the Foodnome platform helps home chefs get through some of this red tape faster.
California remains one of the few states where it’s legal to make and sell food from one’s own kitchen. Shef, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, operates a similar service to Foodnome. On the other side of the country, Woodspoon does much the same thing for NYC residents.
