Francesca Fago had always baked for joy, sharing her sweet treats with family and friends. When Covid-19 hit in 2020 and the stores shut down, her friends begged her to sell her baked goods to them. With a little research, she discovered that Florida had a law that enabled home-based foodmakers to sell their products to customers. Permission granted, she opened Simply Sweets SRQ in 2021.

The state’s cottage food law allows people who make products that fall under a certain set of guidelines to avoid having to register their business with the state and exempts them from inspections by the state health department. The list of things you can make and sell from your home is limited, and includes shelf-stable items like breads, pastries, candies, jams, seasoning blends, honey, pasta, cereals and nut butters—all of which can be sold directly to a consumer, but never wholesale.

Lucky for Fago, at the same time she was launching Simply Sweets, the state increased the maximum gross sales that a cottage business can generate from $50,000 to $250,000, giving business owners like her an opportunity to scale up their operations. “I’ve grown to be able to fill orders as big as 500 cookies or even 5,000 cakepops, which I did last year,” she says.

Those huge orders can take Fago up to a week and a half of around-the-clock work, but she takes much smaller orders for personalized desserts, too. “Word of mouth can be really great,” she says. “Thanks to people talking about my business, I get to bake for all kinds of events.”

Fago has no intention of opening a commercial space because she loves her current flexibility, which allows her to build her schedule around her two young children. “Having the cottage law in Florida lets small businesses like me cut through a lot of red tape, stay small and have genuine connections with our community,” she says.