Our Story: Why We Started the National Cottage Food Alliance
Our Why: Who We Are and What We’re Building
Hi friends - Lisa here, President of the Board and co-founder of the NCFA. Matt and I started the National Cottage Food Alliance because cottage food entrepreneurs, people running a legal food business out of their own kitchen, deserve a national organization built specifically for them, like so many other industries already have. Here’s how we got here, and what that actually means.
As for me, fifteen years ago, I started selling cookies out of a home kitchen with zero idea what I was doing. No plan, no pricing strategy, definitely no idea cottage food law even existed… Making cookies was a hobby that got out of control, and I started selling them initially to recoup some costs, but I continued because I loved seeing how sweet treats can brighten up someone’s day. I priced by feel instead of by math and found out the hard way what that costs: side hustling after my bio-tech job , getting 4 hours of sleep just to make about $8 an hour — repeat that for a few years and I promise it’s not a recipe for success.
I’ve spent years after that as a licensed cottage food producer, advocating for niche things like whether meringue powder should be allowed in royal icing; the kind of detail that sounds small until it’s the difference between a legal business and an illegal one.
Matt’s path there looked different but landed in the same place. A veteran of the Army and the Minnesota Army National Guard, he built his own cottage bakery, Sergeant Shortbread, after his service. He kept running into the same wall Lisa did: cottage food law in this country is scattered, inconsistent, and depends entirely on who happens to answer the phone at your state’s health department that day. So he started The Cottage Foodie, and eventually built CottageFoodieCon, the first in-person national conference for people doing exactly this kind of work.
Somewhere in the middle of helping Matt build CFC, we realized the conference alone wasn’t enough. An event once a year doesn’t fix a law that’s confusing the other 364 days. It doesn’t get anyone in front of a legislator. It doesn’t tell a new baker in a new state what they can actually sell.
So we set out on an ambitious journey to build something that could.
What We’re Trying to Create
The National Cottage Food Alliance is the first national trade association built specifically for cottage food operators and cottage food entrepreneurs, people running a legal food business out of their own kitchen. Not (just) a course. Not (just) a tool. An actual alliance: real advocacy in front of the legislators who write these laws, education built for how cottage bakers actually operate, and a community of people doing this alongside you instead of alone.
Here’s what that means in practice, and what we’re building toward:
Education that assumes you’re running a real business, not a hobby: state-specific compliance guidance, pricing tools, and a resource library built from what cottage bakers actually ask us, not what looks good on a website.
A community that’s already real. Discord is open today, free and paid, and it’s already where the honest day-to-day conversation is happening.
Advocacy, because it’s the part nobody else is doing. We’re standing up real legislative monitoring and direct advocacy work right now, tracking cottage food bills across all 50 states and representing your interests where the actual decisions get made.
We’re not going to pretend all of this exists yet. Some of it is live right now. Some of it is weeks away. Some of it, honestly, is going to take real time, legislative relationships aren’t built in a webinar, it can take years. We’d rather tell you that plainly than let you find out later.
We’re Not Doing This Alone
Nicole Bendig-Lamb, our Treasurer, owns Cake Business School and spent over a decade as a public accountant before that, she’s the one making sure NCFA’s finances and every member’s actual path to profitability get taken as seriously as the advocacy work. Kirsten Barott-Bebo, our Secretary, brings more than a decade running nonprofit and association operations, membership engagement, governance, events, the parts that make an organization actually function day to day, not just exist on paper.
Join Us
If you’ve ever tried to untangle your own state’s cottage food law and come away more confused than when you started, that’s exactly why this exists. Founding membership is open now through Nov. 22, 2026, and we’d genuinely like you to be one of the people who helped build this from the ground floor.
Your kitchen. Your business. Your right.
— Lisa He, Board President & Co-Founder, and Matt Rosen, Executive Director & Co-Founder
