INDIANAPOLIS – The door to opportunity has opened wider for home-based makers of maple syrup, cookies and other shelf stable food products from Indiana.

Gov. Eric Holcomb signed legislation March 8 allowing such producers to sell their products to customers physically from their homes or anywhere else face-to-face. The law will take effect July 1.

Online sales of home-based food products were also made legal as long as delivery occurs within state boundaries. Previously, it was only legal for such home-based vendors to offer their food products at farmers markets and roadside stands.

Home-based vendors can only sell items that are marked “not for resale.” They cannot sell to a retail establishment. 

The intent of the law is more about helping people like single mothers supplement their incomes and providing a new income stream for struggling rural economies, said Jeff Cummins, Indiana Farm Bureau associate director of policy engagement.

This new law does not apply to vendors selling food products like meat raised on their property. Those vendors fall under another category with stricter requirements. 

Cummins said the previous restrictions became outdated when many home-based vendors knowingly or unknowingly broke the law by turning to online sales to make up for losses when farmers markets in 2020 shut down early in the pandemic.

“We saw an avenue there that could bring these folks into the modern economy,” he said.

Doug Mark, who produces about 150 gallons of maple syrup from his 25 acres of woods near Lebanon, said the monetary gains should be more noticeable for home-based vendors who never strayed outside the boundaries of the previous restrictions. “They’re going to be able to have a whole lot of avenues for sale they didn’t have before,” he said.

Mark said the real benefit for him and other former law-breaking producers is more psychological. The fear of what were likely slim odds for enforcement and a somewhat guilty conscience has been removed. “It’s one less thing to worry about,” he said.

John Loucks, of New Paris, said his sales probably won’t benefit much either.

He also expressed a sense of relief that he and other home-based vendors are no longer breaking the law. He was already selling much of the roughly 700 gallons of maple syrup he makes annually to customers showing up at his house.

Loucks said he was also making very limited online sales but probably won’t increase his cyber presence because shipping costs are nearly as much as his product. “I guess nothing has really changed for me but anything to help out and make it legal. Yeah, it’ll help,” Loucks said.

However, Loucks said the industry as a whole should benefit, especially from online sales possibly creating new markets by giving people access to home-based products they previously never tasted.

“Anything to get out there and open up more markets is a good thing,” he said.

Under the law, a home-based vendor shall prepare and sell only a food product that is made, grown or raised at the individual’s primary residence. The sale of products made on property leased by vendors must still occur strictly at farmers markets and roadside stands.

Cummins said leasing was excluded from the law because that could involve things like commercial kitchens, where the making of products might be viewed more as wholesale.

Cummins said maple syrup makers drawing sap from woods they lease still qualify for the loosened restrictions as long as the syrup is made somewhere on their own residential property.

Under the law, containers and other packaging containing home-based food products must also be sanitized and labeled. The label must include things like the name and address of the producer, the name of the food product, ingredients and date it was processed.

The law also mandates that producers maintain a record of addresses of each customer for at least one year after the date of sale. The list of addresses, if requested, must be submitted to the state.

He said obtaining customer addresses is required as a precaution to trace products if a health concern related to product ever developed. Cummins said he doesn’t expect major problems with any outbreaks, though, because the law applies to products with stable shelf lives.

According to the law, the label must also inform consumers that no routine health department inspection is required for the product.

Cummins said a health department inspection of a home-based operation would occur, though, in response to a consumer complaint.

Under the law, home-based foods must be inside a sealed package when shipped or delivered, to allow the buyer to tell whether any tampering has been done to the product.

Home-based vendors must also obtain a food handler certificate and, upon request, provide a copy of the certificate to the state or consumer.

Home-based producers of other food products like chicken and rabbit  must still operate under another existing law. Cummins said that law requires chicken, for example, be sold refrigerated on farms but frozen if offered at farmers markets and roadside stands. “Those requirements remain in place for those products,” he said.