Buying dinner rolls from a neighbor is a different decision than pulling them off a shelf, and you should get to make it with the real facts in front of you. So here's all of it: the paperwork a baker holds before their shop opens, the insurance they carry, the foods Arizona makes them put into your hands in person, and the sentence the state makes them print on every package.
we'd rather you hear it from us
Written August 2026Phoenix, Arizona
A home kitchen, which is all cottage food has ever meant. The photographs on this page are illustrative. None of them shows a Cottage & Kin baker or a real order.
The law, in plain words
Start with what Arizona actually allows.
Arizona lets a person bake in their own home kitchen and sell what they make, with no commercial kitchen and no restaurant permit. That permission is called the cottage food exemption, it lives in state law at A.R.S. 36-931 through 36-933, and the word exemption is carrying most of that sentence.
A restaurant gets a permit and a health inspector. A cottage food baker gets neither, on purpose. What the state asks of them instead is narrower and more specific: they register their own name with the Arizona Department of Health Services, they keep to foods the state treats as lower risk, they label every package with their name and their registration number, and they tell you in writing that no health authority looks at their kitchen.
That's the whole arrangement. It's a reasonable one, and it's a different one from the bakery on the corner. So we say that out loud instead of letting you assume it.
What the law requires
Of every baker, every day
An active Cottage Food Program registration from the Arizona Department of Health Services, issued to a person and renewed every three years.
A current food handler card for whoever bakes or directly supervises the baking.
A full label on every package: their name, their registration number, the ingredients, the allergens, the date that batch was made, and the two sentences the state writes for them.
Sales and delivery inside Arizona only.
Their own kitchen, with no storing of food or equipment anywhere else.
What the law leaves out
And always has
Any visit to their kitchen, before they register or after.
Any government approval of a recipe, an ingredient, or a method.
Any license or grade covering the food itself.
Sources: A.R.S. 36-931 through 36-933, and Arizona Administrative Code R9-8-101.02. We keep the rules as code, so a listing that breaks one of them can't be built in the first place.
Our part
See the two documents and the policy that open a shop.
We can't stand in a baker's kitchen, and we won't invent a badge that suggests we did. What we can do is keep a shop closed until the paperwork the state requires is in our hands, and take it down on the day that paperwork expires. All of it is paperwork, and paperwork is all it is.
01
The baker's ADHS registration
What it is
A Cottage Food Program registration from the Arizona Department of Health Services. It belongs to a person, never to a company, and it carries a number. It renews every three years.
When we check
Before their first listing goes live, and again against the expiry date we store. We warn them at 60 days and again at 30.
If it lapses
Their listings come down automatically that day. The delisting doesn't wait for anyone to notice.
What you see
The registration number, on every listing and on the label stuck to your box.
02
The baker's food handler card
What it is
An accredited food handler certificate, held by whoever bakes or directly supervises the baking. It has its own expiry date, separate from the registration.
When we check
Before their first listing goes live, and again against the date on the card.
If it lapses
Same as the registration. The shop goes dark until the new card is in our hands.
What you see
An open shop, which is a shop with both documents current. That's what open means here.
03
The baker's insurance
What it is
Product liability insurance on what they sell, carried by the baker themselves. Every baker on Cottage & Kin carries it.
What it does
Nothing to the food. It doesn't make a kitchen cleaner and we won't pretend it does.
Why it's here
So that if something goes wrong, there's a real policy standing behind the person who baked it instead of a hard conversation and a hopeful email.
Whose it is
Theirs. They're the seller, so the cover sits with them. The two documents above are the ones we hold and watch the dates on.
Two documents and a policy. That's the entire list, and you should know exactly how long it is. Every baker on Cottage & Kin is registered with the Arizona Department of Health Services Cottage Food Program, and you can read their registration number on anything they sell.
The part that has to be said
No health authority inspects these kitchens.
Not us, not Maricopa County, not the state.
Nobody visits before they register, and nobody visits after. Nobody swabs a counter, reads a refrigerator thermometer, or looks at where they keep the flour. Registering is a form and a fee, and the food handler card is a course and a test. Both are real, both are required, and neither one is a person standing in their kitchen.
You'll read a version of this eventually, because the state makes them print it on the package. We'd rather you read it here first, in a sentence we chose, than find it on a sticker after you've paid.
What you get instead is specific: a name, a registration number, a batch date, and a person close enough to hand you the box themselves. That's a different kind of accountability from a health grade in a window, and you get to weigh it yourself.
The dessert with a rule on it
Order the cheesecake. They hand it to you themselves.
Arizona treats cottage foods that are dairy products, or that contain meat or poultry, differently from everything else, and the difference is about how they reach you rather than whether they can be sold. The statute lets the baker sell those "remotely, including over the internet," and then requires them "delivered to the consumer in person." So they list the cheesecake, you order and pay here, and then you collect it from them or they drive it to you. No courier touches one, now or later.
This page said the opposite for months. It said dairy, meat and poultry couldn't be sold here at all, which was wrong, and wrong about the best thing on a lot of menus. The list below is what the in-person rule actually covers.
Cheesecake, and anything else built on a custard or a cream filling.
Cream cheese frosting, which is the one that decides a lot of very good cinnamon rolls.
Meat hand pies, jerky, and anything containing poultry.
Everything without dairy, meat or poultry in it travels the same two ways today. Arizona would also allow a delivery service to carry that second group, and we don't run one, so for now every order on Cottage & Kin goes from their hands to yours. The ingredients they declare set the handoff while they write the listing, so a courier option can never appear on something the law says they have to hand over.
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, so no handoff fixes them, and our code turns down the listing.
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 put the question to the Department of Health Services. Our structure is built for the reading where the baker is the seller, because the payment runs on their own Stripe account, we never take title to their food, and we never deliver it. If the answer comes back the other way, you'll read it here the day we hear it.
Two hours, one trip, one stop
Anything temperature sensitive gets a single trip to a single destination, no more than two hours, and that includes however long they sit in traffic. That's the state's rule and we build the matching around it. It's why a baker's range looks small, why perishable things are only offered on the day they leave their kitchen, and why you can't order on Thursday for a Saturday party if it has to stay cold.
Sealed the way they sealed it
Every item reaches you in the packaging the baker closed, tamper evident and fully enclosed. Nobody opens it in between, and nobody rebundles items into a gift box, which is also why we can't sell you one. There's no warehouse in the middle of this and there never will be. They bake it, they pack it, and it goes to you.
Allergies
Ask before you order if an allergy in your house is serious.
Every listing shows the ingredients and the allergens the baker declares, including a checked list covering the nine major allergens:
milk
eggs
fish
shellfish
tree nuts
peanuts
wheat
soybeans
sesame
They fill that in. We show it the way they wrote it, alongside the full ingredient list.
What that list can't cover is the rest of the kitchen. These are homes: one counter, one mixer, one oven and one set of hands handle everything they bake and everything their household eats. Flour travels. Nuts travel. Cross contact is possible in any home kitchen, and no set of checkboxes changes that.
So ask before you order: what else they bake that week, what they store beside it, and how they handle it. Send us the question and we'll put it to them. They would far rather answer it than get it wrong, and if the answer leaves you unsure, order something else. Nobody will be offended.
We'll never tell you a listing is safe for a particular allergy. We're not in their kitchen, and neither is anybody else.
On every listing, on every box
Read the label. It says more than we do.
Every listing carries the same label the package carries, generated from the same fields, so the sticker and the page can't drift apart. Two of the sentences on it are written by the state, word for word. We're not allowed to soften them or rewrite them, and we wouldn't anyway, because they're the most useful sentences on the page.
This product was produced in a home kitchen that may come in contact with common food allergens and pet allergens and is not subject to public health inspection.
To obtain additional information about cottage foods or to report a foodborne illness, go to azdhs.gov/Cottagefood
A prototype example. Cottage & Kin has no bakers yet, so every value in brackets is a placeholder and the ingredient list is illustrative. The two state sentences are exact.
They bake it, they seal it, and they either hand it to you or bring it to your door themselves. Nobody else touches the box between their kitchen and yours.
The baker's name and number
The registration belongs to a person, so the name on the label is the person who baked it, and the number belongs to them.
The production date
It's per batch, not per product. Cookies they made on Tuesday and cookies they made on Friday carry different dates, and that's what makes one specific box traceable if it ever has to be.
The ingredients and the allergens
A full list, exactly as they declared it. We don't summarize it and we don't tidy it up.
The first state sentence
It tells you the food came out of a home kitchen that may come in contact with common food allergens and pet allergens, and that no public health inspection applies to it. The state writes that sentence. We render it word for word.
The second state sentence
It tells you where to go for more information or to report a foodborne illness. It routes to the state instead of to us, and that's the point of it.
If it goes wrong
Tell somebody the same day an order isn't right.
Start with your baker. They'd want to know, and most of these end there with an apology and a fresh batch.
Then tell us, even once they have fixed it. One complaint is a bad Saturday. A run of them is a pattern, and a pattern is the thing we can act on. A shop can come offline the same day, and a food safety concern is reason enough on its own.
If you think food from any cottage food kitchen made you ill, report it to the state at azdhs.gov/Cottagefood. That's the address printed on every label, it goes straight to the Arizona Department of Health Services, and it doesn't route through us. Tell us as well, so we can pull that batch and reach everyone else who ordered from it.
Your call
Decide with all of it in front of you.
We'd rather you read this page and order with your eyes open, or read it and decide this isn't for you. Both of those beat finding out later.
