I think I'm stuck in a Kafka story.
At what point do I give up on my little dream of my own little chocolate business?
I went to drop off the final paperwork (not actually as final as I'd thought, as it turns out, but enough to get the ball rolling) for the Zoning Board today, and dropped in on the Health Department to see if they'd be any more useful now that the ZBA process was underway. The Health Department was, in fact, very friendly, and it looked like everything was going to work perfectly... right up until they discovered I don't actually have two kitchens in my house.
Apparently, despite the MA regulations on residential kitchens for retail sale, Waltham's Board of Health will never approve of a kitchen being used for both home cooking and catering/retail/commercial sales. Not even if you strip it to the walls, bleach everything, and cook elsewhere until the commercial work is done. If I'm going to have a cooking business in Waltham, a second kitchen is a requirement; and, by "kitchen", we mean stove, fridge, hand-washing sink, mop sink, three-basin sink (yes, all separate), adequate counterspace, and a nonporous floor. I have a non-porous floor. And I might be able to persuade them to let me reuse an existing sink (or bathtub) as a mop sink. That still leaves an awful lot of kitchen to acquire.
I am not *entirely* out of options; the friendly lady at the health department recommended that, if I have an early December deadline, I should first check with the state to see if I can get an inspection from them and a wholesale license, in which case Waltham would just approve a catering license for me and that would be easy enough, though I would need another catering license for *every single town* I intend to sell chocolate in. (! I don't think I get to do residential kitchen for wholesale sale, though.) Or, she said, if I can find someone with a commercial kitchen who isn't always using it (the Elks was her example) and wouldn't mind my using it for a little while, I could be licenses for business in their kitchen. However, I don't have *any* contacts in local organizations with commercial kitchens; and what am I going to do, offer to make chocolate for their next charity event? I'm happy to do payment in kind, but I've never rented a commercial kitchen, and I expect I would only be able to afford it in as much as it's got to be cheaper than building one.
*sigh*
I should at least call the state, but... we'd been planning on putting in the second kitchen much later, if business was going well. It's a huge investment, and I really doubt I'd ever make it up in profits; I'm just too small, unless I'm off by an order of magnitude in costs. I'm in absolute shock that there doesn't appear to be a middle ground; either I have my own commercial kitchen, and I can sell to whomever I like within the town including stores, or I don't, and I can't sell anything to anyone without dodging the Health Department. This is ridiculous. I never expected moving by two towns to change my requirements this much; I was just figuring that they'd be pickier about sanitizing my dishes than Arlington was. I'm starting to regret moving, even though I do love my house.
I just wanted to make people happy and have fun. I never thought I was signing up for a 10k investment and months of business-hours-only bureaucracy. When do I give up?
I went to drop off the final paperwork (not actually as final as I'd thought, as it turns out, but enough to get the ball rolling) for the Zoning Board today, and dropped in on the Health Department to see if they'd be any more useful now that the ZBA process was underway. The Health Department was, in fact, very friendly, and it looked like everything was going to work perfectly... right up until they discovered I don't actually have two kitchens in my house.
Apparently, despite the MA regulations on residential kitchens for retail sale, Waltham's Board of Health will never approve of a kitchen being used for both home cooking and catering/retail/commercial sales. Not even if you strip it to the walls, bleach everything, and cook elsewhere until the commercial work is done. If I'm going to have a cooking business in Waltham, a second kitchen is a requirement; and, by "kitchen", we mean stove, fridge, hand-washing sink, mop sink, three-basin sink (yes, all separate), adequate counterspace, and a nonporous floor. I have a non-porous floor. And I might be able to persuade them to let me reuse an existing sink (or bathtub) as a mop sink. That still leaves an awful lot of kitchen to acquire.
I am not *entirely* out of options; the friendly lady at the health department recommended that, if I have an early December deadline, I should first check with the state to see if I can get an inspection from them and a wholesale license, in which case Waltham would just approve a catering license for me and that would be easy enough, though I would need another catering license for *every single town* I intend to sell chocolate in. (! I don't think I get to do residential kitchen for wholesale sale, though.) Or, she said, if I can find someone with a commercial kitchen who isn't always using it (the Elks was her example) and wouldn't mind my using it for a little while, I could be licenses for business in their kitchen. However, I don't have *any* contacts in local organizations with commercial kitchens; and what am I going to do, offer to make chocolate for their next charity event? I'm happy to do payment in kind, but I've never rented a commercial kitchen, and I expect I would only be able to afford it in as much as it's got to be cheaper than building one.
*sigh*
I should at least call the state, but... we'd been planning on putting in the second kitchen much later, if business was going well. It's a huge investment, and I really doubt I'd ever make it up in profits; I'm just too small, unless I'm off by an order of magnitude in costs. I'm in absolute shock that there doesn't appear to be a middle ground; either I have my own commercial kitchen, and I can sell to whomever I like within the town including stores, or I don't, and I can't sell anything to anyone without dodging the Health Department. This is ridiculous. I never expected moving by two towns to change my requirements this much; I was just figuring that they'd be pickier about sanitizing my dishes than Arlington was. I'm starting to regret moving, even though I do love my house.
I just wanted to make people happy and have fun. I never thought I was signing up for a 10k investment and months of business-hours-only bureaucracy. When do I give up?