FRESNO COUNTY, Calif. (FOX26) — A California bill is opening doors for home cooks across the state.
Assembly bill 626 allows the California health and safety code to establish a “Microenterprise home kitchen operation.”
However in Fresno County, that door remains closed.
While several counties have opted into California’s micro-enterprise home kitchen program, Fresno County says its still exploring whether or not to allow it.
Inside a Fresno kitchen, the stove is one woman’s office.
She has been blind for more than 15 years. Despite her disability, she continues to cook.
She knows every inch of her kitchen, and recipes by heart.
“I’ve always been cooking all my life. I love to cook and I’m cooking out of my home,” she says.
Before she lost her sight due to domestic violence, she owned a permitted Taco Truck.
But after becoming blind, she says physical and financial barriers of operating a truck or opening a restaurant became impossible.
Still, she never stopped cooking.
“It’s easier for me to come and cook out of my home. It is easier. I rely on the money’s coming in because all I have is, of course, some handicaps, so I have to check monthly,” she said.
And this is another source of income that I can count on to help myself to stretch out for the rest of the month.
California now allows people to legally sell hot meals from their home, however, Fresno County, has not opted into the program.
“There are concerns from cities like having to deal with complaints about traffic and crowding and neighborhoods. So there’s there’s any number of reasons why a county has not adopted it,” said Mathew Gore, a Supervising Environmental Health Specialist here in Fresno County Environmental Health.
Signed into law in 2019, AB 626 gives the county full discretion to authorize MEHKO in their jurisdiction.
For our accountability question, I asked if there are plans in the future to implement to help vulnerable people make a living.
“We’ve been reaching out to other environmental health departments throughout the state and finding out what their experiences are,” said Gore.
For now , if you’re looking to sell food in the county, it may come at a high cost.
“Sometimes it’s not just not possible with what they want to do, but we really try to offer all of the different options as far as operating a restaurant, operating a food truck,” said Gore.
Options many low income families simply cant afford.
“The lower income families that are scared to go out there and get a business of their own. It’s not as easy as everybody needs,” she said.
The county says food like jam and baked goods are allowed to be sold out of homes, but for hot meals, that door remains closed for now.