Maybe you’ve wondered why we don’t have an online store yet. And why we aren’t selling our awesome canned products yet. Well it’s not because we don’t want to, it’s because we can’t. Yet.
If you follow our Instagram feed, you’ve probably noticed that we love to can our produce and have really gotten adventurous with our recipes. It’s funny how so much changes in a year. A year ago I found the idea of canning to be terrifying. Terrifying for it’s tediousness, it’s time-consuming steps and, oh yeah, that whole botulism food poisoning thing. It took some internal cheerleading but we took the initial plunge into the world of canning and it turned out to be a ton of fun! We’ve more than got the hang of it and we love it! We’re always on a search for new and fun canning ideas, we’ll can pretty much anything at this point.
Many of our friends and customers ask about purchasing our canned goods. And after some quick research we learned that we had a ton of paperwork to do before we could even think about selling our products online. (Well, that’s not true, we think about selling our products all the time. Ha)
Rules, Rules, Rules!
The Illinois Cottage Food law allows us to sell some canned goods directly to customers at farmer’s markets, but that is it. Online sales or sales to retailers are strictly prohibited. So our friends and family have been really benefiting from all these rules. Haha.
Next up, hot sauces, giardaneria, Bloody Mary mix, bourbon pears, salsa verde etc…has to go through and pass a rigorous process before it’s ever sold.
All our recipes must be be pH tested by an accredited lab and then submitted to a “process authority” with the pH test results. This person reviews the recipe, test results and steps we detail for producing the canned good and sends back to us an “official” process. We then register that process with the FDA. Each product and each variation of that product (change in container size, container closure, recipe adjustment, change in commercial kitchen location, etc.) MUST go through all these steps.
Safety is important to us
The process is very involved. But it makes sense, farms and businesses need to be required to prove that they’re doing things the healthy and clean way. People can become very sick or even die. So we get it. And appreciate the process. We just want it to move a little quicker so we can share our delicious goodies! We’re shooting for early January. Obviously, the timeline isn’t completely up to us. We will create an Etsy store and also list our products in the Shop page of our website. Stay tuned!
