Colorado ‘Tamale Act’ could open the door for more home kitchen entrepreneurs

The Combi Taco Catering crew make boxed meals at a commercial kitchen in Denver’s Athmar Park neighborhood. April 13, 2026. (Rae Solomon, CPR via Colorado Capitol News Alliance)

Lawmakers are considering a proposal to bring DIY entrepreneurs out of the shadows with a bill that would lift the prohibition on refrigerated cottage foods, allowing up to $150,000 in annual sales

When Alejandro Flores-Muñoz was a kid, he watched his mom build a side business out of her home kitchen. “My mom would sell cheesecake and flan and sell it door to door,” Flores-Muñoz recalled.  The business was informal. She wasn’t incorporated and didn’t have a business license. But as a new immigrant to the U.S. without work status, it helped her support her family and gave her son an early appreciation for entrepreneurship. Indeed, Flores-Muñoz grew up to be a food entrepreneur just like his mom. But the business he built, Combi Taco Catering, is a much bigger operation, with seven employees, working out of a commercial kitchen in Denver. Flores-Muñoz says the company is on track for about $1.7 million in sales this year, most of it from a catering contract with the city of Denver serving two city shelters.

“Right now we are in full production mode, cooking over 900 daily meals seven days a week,” Flores-Muñoz said. “Coming from a background of having to cook meals from a home kitchen to having this huge production is something to be really proud of.”

Flores-Muñoz’s trajectory is unusual. In Colorado, many home-based food businesses — so-called “cottage foods” — are illegal, making it very difficult for startup food entrepreneurs to scale up. The law only allows sales of shelf-stable foods like bread, spices and honey. Anything that needs refrigeration or other temperature control is currently prohibited.

But lawmakers are now considering a proposal to bring those DIY entrepreneurs out of the shadows with a bill that would lift the prohibition on refrigerated cottage foods, allowing up to $150,000 in annual sales. Producers would be required to register with the state, take some food safety courses, along with some other guardrails.  The legislation, which has passed one House committee and awaits a second committee hearing, addresses an issue at the heart of the so-called Food Freedom movement now gaining traction in Colorado and beyond: the idea that home cooks should have the right to sell food out of their own kitchens without government interference.

“We know this is happening already,” said Republican Rep. Ryan Gonzalez of Greeley, who sponsored the bill for the second time this year. “This bill aims to legalize what we see already in the streets.” Gonzalez dubbed it the “Tamale Act” for the “tamale ladies,” common in his Greeley neighborhood who offer their homemade delicacies to the public. “Especially in my community, we have a lot of Hispanic population, and they sell burritos, tamales, tortas, ” Gonzalez said. “ I would see a tamale lady sometimes at the bank when I was working there. She would come with their trunk full of tamales just to sell them by the dozen or half dozens.”

He says the legitimacy offered in his proposal would bring those informal entrepreneurs more economic opportunity, like the means to advertise and build a strong customer base before making big business investments like leasing space in a commercial kitchen.  “This is a policy that will be a stepping stone for cottage foods vendors to eventually start a business,” Gonzalez said. “We want to get these people into (food) trucks, into restaurants so they can pay taxes, they can have that revenue, they can go through the licensing and the inspection, do all that stuff.”

The idea has bipartisan support and the governor’s blessing. It passed its first budget committee easily. But in this tight budget year, it’s not clear that the Tamale Act will become law because of the associated costs of regulating all those new businesses.  Of course, the Tamale Act isn’t just about tamales. The law opens the door for home cooks to sell other products: sauerkraut, kimchi, sausage, buttercream cakes, potato salad and casseroles, just to name a few.

It’s a list that makes public health officials cringe.  “It will make people sick,” said Shawna Johnson, consumer protection coordinator with Boulder County Public Health. “We will see a rise in foodborne illness. We could see illnesses like Salmonella, E. coli, or things like Norovirus.” But it’s not just the risk of food-borne illness that gives public health officials pause. After all, Johnson said most cottage food producers never make people sick. But the bill does not provide additional funding for public health departments that simply don’t have the resources or staff to respond to more food-borne outbreaks. “My team is already stretched thin,” Johnson said. “There’s reduced funding. People have been laid off.”

Food-borne illness outbreaks suck up a lot of resources as public health officials respond with a small army of specialists, from food safety experts and investigators to epidemiologists and water quality teams. “Without any resources, it would be really tough to manage,” Johnson said.

Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nonpartisan legislative staff estimate the Tamale Act would lead to two additional outbreaks a year in Colorado. But underground commerce, like illegal cottage food sales, is notoriously difficult to study, so the true risks of the legislation remain unclear. The same could be said of the benefits, although emerging research on the cottage food industry suggests legalization can spur real entrepreneurship.

“For some subset of these businesses, they do become employers,” said Dawn Thilmany, a Colorado State University economist. “They do grow and become economically viable businesses.”

#   #  

Article courtesy of Colorado Sun and Rae Solomon, CPR News