A bill to regulate Wisconsin's cottage food industry has drawn opposition from home bakers. (Photo courtesy of Becca Barth)

A Wisconsin Senate committee held a public hearing Tuesday on legislation that would create a regulatory system for the cottage food industry in Wisconsin. 

In the hearing of the Committee on Transportation and Local Government, representatives of restaurants, commercial bakeries and grocery stores supported the proposal arguing that the bill would treat all food sellers equally, while the home bakers who would be affected by the bill complained that it would institute harsh income restrictions while subjecting them to requirements that aren’t relevant to the specifics of selling food out of a home kitchen. 

Authored by Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Oconto), the bill has largely Republican support but Milwaukee-area Democratic Reps. Russell Goodwin and Sylvia Ortiz-Velez have signed on as co-sponsors. 

Under the bill, cottage food producers would be required to register with the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. As part of that registration, people would need to provide a list of all the foods they sell and an ingredient list for each item. Any producer that earns between $10,000 and $40,000 in revenue from their home business would be subject to inspections by DATCP. 

Anyone who makes more than $40,000 in revenue would no longer be considered a cottage food producer and would be required to obtain work space in a commercial kitchen. 

The cottage food industry in Wisconsin was allowed to grow after a 2017 lawsuit struck down a state law banning the sale of home baked goods. Since then, the state has operated with just the court precedent guiding the industry. 

Throughout the hearing, commercial industry representatives pushed for the passage of the bill as it’s written. Lobbying records show that the Wisconsin Bakers Association, Wisconsin Restaurants Association and Wisconsin Grocers Association have supported the bill. 

“You have created these rules for me, and I get to be surprise inspected and tested on them to ensure consumer food safety,” Chrissy Meisner, owner of a bakery in Bloomer and member of the Wisconsin Bakers Association, said. “It is clear, even in my small town, that your honor system of them following the rules doesn’t work. There seems to be a need for the same oversight you require of me to sell bread and cookies applied to everyone.”

While much of the testimony in favor of the bill focused on food safety issues, some of those in favor also said they were concerned about competition from home producers. 

“There’s only so much food that can be sold into a community,” Susan Quam, executive vice president of the Wisconsin Restaurant Association, said. “And everyone needs to fight for their share of those sales, whether it’s the grocery store, the local bakery, the restaurant or the cottage food baker. However, the first three are regulated, licensed, and have a lot of different and additional requirements that are put upon them to get that same very low profit margin.”

Home producers at the hearing said they would welcome regulation to tame their industry’s current wild west landscape, just not the regulations under the bill as currently written. The Wisconsin Farmers Union and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty have both lobbied against the bill. 

The 2017 lawsuit that helped the industry bloom was litigated by the Institute for Justice, a national non-profit law firm focused on civil liberties. Ellen Hamlett, the organization’s activism manager, said she believes there’s “been a lot of industry pressure” to draft the current version of the bill. 

“Wisconsin’s cottage food laws are overdue for reform,” Hamlett said. “It is very important to note that the way that this bill is structured will jeopardize the living of many cottage food producers.”

Jobea Murray, president of the Wisconsin Cottage Food Association, said that the bill represents a huge administrative burden for both the home producers and for DATCP, which will not receive any additional funding for implementing the registration and inspection requirements under the bill. She also said the food safety certifications required under the bill are specific to restaurant-like settings, which won’t help make home produced products safer. 

“So we want to work with you to get this right,” Murray said. “[The bill] is a great starting point, but it needs significant changes to truly support Wisconsin’s cottage food economy.”

A lot of the opposition to the bill was centered around the $40,000 revenue cap. Several speakers noted that most states that allow the sale of cottage foods have no cap or else set their caps much higher. Iowa and Illinois do not set a cap on their cottage food sales while Minnesota’s revenue cap is $78,000.

Wisconsin Farmers Union President Darin Von Ruden's farm. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

At the Wisconsin Farmers Union annual farm and rural lobby day on Wednesday morning, the organization’s members heard about how antitrust policy, environmental regulation enforcement and immigration law are affecting the state’s farmers. 

About 90 farmers union members sat around tables in a conference room at the Madison Public Library before heading to the Capitol to push their legislators on the group’s 2026 priorities. 

Gov. Tony Evers addressed the group in a kick-off address, discussing  what his administration has accomplished and what it plans to do moving forward as the “chaos and confusion” of the federal government under the Trump administration “continues to make an already strenuous job harder.” 

“Regardless of what happens in Washington, here in America’s Dairyland, we’re going to keep fighting for Wisconsin farmers and producers and their families because Wisconsin’s agricultural industry isn’t just core to our economy, it’s core to our culture, core to our heritage and who we are as a state,” Evers said. 

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul addressed the group next to discuss how the Department of Justice is working to help the state’s farmers, noting the DOJ was involved in the lawsuit to keep federal food benefits available during the government shutdown last year.

He also discussed the DOJ’s work to protect fair markets and evenly enforce the state’s environmental rules to make sure that the state’s largest corporate farms are playing by the same rules as its smallest family operations. 

“One area that we are engaged in is ensuring that the market is fair, that there’s competition, and ensuring that there’s a level playing field for everybody to compete on. To me, that is fundamental to a lot of what we do,” he said. “So one way is regarding consumer protection. Another area where we take that very seriously is protecting our environmental laws and ensuring that the environmental laws in the state are evenhandedly enforced, because, as you all know firsthand, if massive corporate farms are able to cut corners, that puts them at a major competitive advantage, and all the farms that are out there doing the right thing, very carefully complying with rules and regulations that are in place. If the rules aren’t evenly enforced, that puts the small farmers, often small businesses, at a major competitive disadvantage.” 

Immigration crackdown

Among the farmers union’s top legislative priorities this year is protecting immigrant farm workers. 

On immigration, the organization said it is lobbying legislators to oppose a bill that would require all Wisconsin sheriffs to join the federal government’s 287(g) program, which grants sheriff’s deputies some authority to enforce federal immigration law. Under the bill, if counties refused to participate, the state would reduce the amount of shared revenue provided to the county by the state by 15%. 

Across the state, 18 sheriff’s offices have entered 287(g) agreements, including Kenosha County, which signed its contract to hold immigrants in its jail on behalf of ICE last week. 

The organization also wants to support a bill that would allow DACA recipients — people whose parents brought them to the country without documentation when they were children — to obtain occupational credentials such as licenses to practice medicine. 

In a panel on immigration policy, Amanda Martinez, a policy analyst at Kids Forward, said 287(g) can cause fear to spread throughout rural immigrant communities. 

“This could really deeply impact rural communities who already have those smaller budgets, and also impact the immigrant workers within local communities, because they are a big part of the workforce, whether it’s at farms [or] food productions,” Martinez said. “Bills like 287(g) and Assembly Bill 24 really creates that fear in communities, because immigrants don’t want to go to work, take their kids to schools, and can’t really participate in everyday life, and essentially will impact the workforce as a whole.”

Kaul was asked to respond to the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis and criticized the ICE activity that led to the shooting death of Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good, and the exclusion of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from the investigation of that incident.

Attorney General Kaul says Minnesota ICE action harms public safety

Cottage-industry food makers

The Farmers Union is also opposing a bill that would regulate cottage foods makers in a way that advocates said would effectively kill the industry — which was only launched after a lawsuit in 2017 changed existing state law. The bill under consideration this year would require the business owner to use a commercial kitchen if their annual revenue exceeds $40,000. 

Advocates said this limit makes it impossible for these businesses to survive because $40,000 per year isn’t enough to support a family and the cost of renting commercial kitchen space, in communities where that’s even available, would make it harder to turn a profit. 

“If you do revenue of $40,000 your take home or profit is not going to be that, and it is not a living wage, and there is no amount of business you can do and put in an energy that is going to make this a sustainable business, even as a value-add product for farmers,” Jobea Murray, a Milwaukee home baker and president of the Wisconsin Cottage Food Association, said. “The amount of effort and time you put into this. There is no ROI on this. So you can can all day, you can bake all night. You are going to hit that revenue cap and you’re going to make not a lot of money.”