Ask the hard questions first.

Food made in somebody's home kitchen and sold legally, under an Arizona exemption written for exactly that. A registered cottage food preparer bakes in their own kitchen, on their own equipment, and sells straight to the person who eats it. Cookies, breads, cakes, cinnamon rolls, fudge, jam.

It's the same law that lets a neighbor sell banana bread at a farmers market. What they have never had is a counter, and that's the part we're building.

Nobody does, and we're required to tell you so. Arizona cottage food is exempt from public health inspection by statute, and the state writes the sentence every preparer has to display. You'll find it on every listing and printed on every label, in those exact words, because we're not allowed to soften them and wouldn't want to.

Here's what we do check, before their first listing goes up and again before they expire: their registration with the Arizona Department of Health Services Cottage Food Program, and their current food handler card. The registration is issued to them as a person, never to a company, and it carries a number that appears on everything they sell. We also require product liability insurance in their own name, and we help them find a policy rather than leaving them to it.

If the registration or the card lapses, their listings come off the site automatically that day. One check at signup would tell you almost nothing a year later.

You're making the same call you make at a church bake sale, with more in front of you than a bake sale gives you: who baked it, their registration number, everything they put in it, the allergens they've declared, and the date that batch came out of their oven.

What we can't hand you is a health inspector's opinion, because nobody formed one. Any platform promising you more than that is promising something it has no way to know. Read the listing, look at the date, and message them if something isn't clear. They answer their own messages, because there's nobody else to answer them.

Message the baker before you order, and do that for anything serious. Every listing carries their full ingredient list in their own words, plus checkboxes for the nine major allergens: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans and sesame. That tells you what went into the bowl.

What no listing can tell you is what else was on the counter that morning. They're baking in a home kitchen where flour, nuts, a toddler and a dog share one room, and the label Arizona requires says that in writing. So ask them directly. What else did you bake today, and on what surface, is a fair question, and they'd far rather answer it than guess.

No kitchen here can promise you a food is free of an allergen, and none of them will.

Yes, and it comes to you in person. Arizona puts dairy products, meat and poultry in their own tier, and the tier is about how the food reaches you rather than whether it can be sold. The statute lets a baker sell those over the internet and then requires the baker to put those into your hands themselves, so you collect from them or they drive it to you. Nobody else ever carries one.

That covers cheesecake, cream cheese frosting, custard fillings and a hand pie with meat in it. Everything else travels the same two ways today. The law would also allow a delivery service to carry the items with no dairy, meat or poultry in them, and we don't run one, so for now every order on Cottage & Kin goes from their hands to yours.

A few things are out whoever carries them: fish, shellfish, raw milk, alcohol, and marijuana or anything made with it. Those aren't cottage food in Arizona at all.

The number on the listing is the number you pay. Nothing gets added at the last screen, no service fee, no small print, and no total that moved while you were reading it.

Our cut is already inside that number. We charge it on your side and then fold it into the one price, which is a deliberate choice and partly a self-interested one. A fee that appears at checkout is how a person learns to text the baker directly next time and cut the whole thing out, and the baker is the one who then loses the order record and any recourse when something goes wrong.

The baker sets what they want for their baking, and they can see our part of the price to the cent on their own screen. If you want to see the arithmetic yourself, it's all on the pricing page.

Two ways, and both of them are the baker. You pick it up from them, or they bring it to you themselves.

There's no warehouse in the middle, no courier hub, no locker, and there never will be. Arizona bars a cottage food baker from storing their food or their equipment anywhere but their own home, so it goes from their kitchen to your hands with nobody else touching it.

Anything temperature-sensitive gets one trip, one stop, and two hours including whatever the traffic decides to do. That's the statutory cap, and it's why a baker's delivery range looks smaller than a delivery app's.

Their registration lets them sell and deliver inside Arizona. It doesn't travel across the state line, so there's no box to your mother in Ohio, not even in December. That's the first thing people ask for at the holidays, and we'd rather say it here than surprise you at checkout.

When there's a second state, it'll be because a baker who lives there registered under their own state's law.

Because a cottage food registration is a state thing, and every state wrote its own. They disagree with each other about what can be sold, by whom, and how far it can travel. There's no national version to sign up for.

So Arizona first, done properly, before anywhere else. Phoenix opens in October 2026.

They sold the batch. A batch is one baking session: what they made, how many they made, and the day they made them. When they're gone the listing closes until they bake it again, so message them and they'll tell you when it's back.

Made-to-order items work the other way around and open a window instead, so they need a few days' notice from you. Nobody has a wedding cake sitting on a rack.

The production date is the day that specific batch came out of their oven. You see it on the listing before you buy, and it's printed on the label when the box reaches you.

Arizona requires that date for each batch, not for each product. That sounds like a small distinction until you try to build a catalog on it. Ours is built on batches all the way down, so the date on the page and the date on the sticker come from one record and can't contradict each other.

Anything perishable is sold the day it's made. The two-hour transport rule leaves room for nothing else.

Not the way you're picturing it. Cottage food has to stay in the packaging the baker sealed, so nobody is allowed to open their cookies and rebundle them into a tin alongside someone else's fudge. That rule binds us exactly as much as it binds them.

Ordering several things at once is fine. Each one arrives sealed the way they made it, with their name and their registration number on it.

Tell us, and tell them. Your payment runs on the baker's own Stripe account rather than sitting in a Cottage & Kin balance, so a refund goes back the way it came instead of waiting for us to release it.

We're building refunds and disputes into the product itself, because perishable food and a two-hour delivery window will produce problems that no policy page can prevent. The exact terms get published here and at checkout before the first real order in October 2026. Posting a window today and walking it back in November would be worse than waiting.

Two fees, and they land on different people. Your buyer pays ours, 5.5% of your price plus 55 cents, folded into the single number she sees. You pay Stripe for the card, 2.9% plus 30 cents, which is the same cut any shop with a card reader hands over.

Nothing monthly, nothing to sign up, nothing to list, and nothing at all in a week you don't bake.

Set your price at $40 and it works out like this.

Your price

$40.00

Our fee, on her side

$2.75

She's shown, and pays

$42.75

Card processing, Stripe

-$1.54

You keep

$38.46

Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents on the full $42.75 it processes, not on your share alone. That money goes to Stripe, not to us.

Three things: an Arizona Department of Health Services Cottage Food Program registration, a current food handler card, and product liability insurance. The registration is issued to you personally and never to an LLC, and it renews every three years. The card runs on its own clock.

You don't need any of it to start. Build your shop first, write your listings, photograph your cinnamon rolls in the good morning light, and get the place looking like yours. We'll walk you through what each document costs, where it comes from, and how long it takes. Your shop goes live the day the paperwork is in.

Sell the cheesecake. Arizona lets you sell dairy products, meat and poultry over the internet and then requires you to put them into the buyer's hands in person, so they list here, she orders and pays here, and then she collects from you or you drive it over. Never by courier, for those, ever. Cream cheese frosting, custard fillings and a meat hand pie all sit in that same group.

Everything without dairy, meat or poultry in it travels the same two ways today. The statute also permits a third-party carrier for that group, and if we ever run one it will only ever touch those items, at your choice, listing by listing.

Genuinely out, whoever carries it: fish, shellfish, raw milk, alcohol, and marijuana or anything made with it. Those aren't cottage food in Arizona, so no handoff fixes them.

One thing we won't call settled. The same sentence that permits internet sales of dairy excludes third-party food delivery platforms, and nobody has yet said which of those a listing site like ours counts as. We've asked the department. Our structure is built for the reading where you're the seller, because the payment runs on your own Stripe account, we never take title, and we never deliver. If the answer comes back the other way, you'll hear it from us the day we hear it.

The charge is created on your own Stripe account for the full amount she paid, so the money is yours from the moment her card clears. Our fee comes off that charge, because it was added on top of your price on her side to begin with, and Stripe's processing comes off it as well. What lands is your price minus the card fee.

Cottage & Kin never holds your money and never pays you out. That's on purpose. A company holding other people's money in Arizona needs a money transmitter license, and a version of this where your revenue sits in our account for a week is worse for you in every way. Payout timing is your own Stripe payout schedule, on your account, under your control.

Yes. Keep the Facebook group, keep the farmers market booth, keep the standing Friday order for the family down the street. Nothing here is exclusive and we won't ask you for that.

We charge on the orders that come through us and on nothing else. If your regulars keep texting you directly, those are yours and they always were.

Your listings come down automatically, that day. We warn you 60 days out and again at 30, so it shouldn't arrive as a shock.

Once either one lapses, the exemption goes with it, and every order after that is an unpermitted food sale. The registration is in your name, so the risk is yours, which is why we watch both dates instead of checking once at signup and filing it away. Send us the renewal and your shop turns back on.

You do, on both counts. Your photos are yours to use anywhere you like, and your buyers are yours if you ever decide to leave.

All we ask for is permission to show your photos on Cottage & Kin while your shop is live. That goes into the seller agreement in writing, in about those words, before the first real order goes through. Read it before you sign it, and ask us about anything in it that reads sideways.

Not yet. Cottage & Kin opens in the Phoenix metro in October 2026, and every maker you see on the site today is a prototype example, built so a baker can look at it and picture their own shop. Nobody has ordered anything from us. There are no reviews, because there's nothing yet to review.

When a real kitchen goes live, their name and their registration number are on it. We're not going to fill a map with invented people to make the place look busy.

October 2026, in Phoenix, deliberately small. A soft launch first, so we find what breaks on twenty orders instead of two thousand, and the holiday season lands on something that already works.

If you bake and you want to be in that first group, start your shop now. The bakers who launch with us get the most of our time, by simple arithmetic.

Four brothers: Jake, Jordan, Caleb and Josh Dunn.

Our Papa baked cinnamon rolls every weekend, and the kids carried them to school and sold them before the first bell. Dunn Buns. Somebody in your neighborhood is already that good, and the only thing they're missing is the counter. Cottage & Kin is the counter he never had.