Pie Baker Whips Up A New Legal Recipe

You’re a small-batch cook, just getting started on your local food business. It’s a small affair: cookies, cakes, pies, around 50 per week to sell at local grocery stores and cafes. All you need is a few hours with an oven, a commercial space, and a permit from the city. Easy, right?

Except the city doesn’t have an incubator kitchen for you to test your culinary sea legs. And you don’t have $100,000 to start a kitchen of your own. You hardly have the $475 it takes to move into someone else’s 3,000 square foot space. And that permit seems harder and harder to get—even though the kitchen has just been licensed for use by five other cooks just like you.

That’s the conundrum Mubarakah Ibrahim faced last year, as she rented a commercial space to begin a baking business. Now thanks to a piece of legislation she is bringing forward, small or “micro” food business owners may be looking at a new, faster, and less expensive culinary landscape.

Ibrahim is a fitness coach, mom, serial entrepreneur, and the founder and chef behind Mmm Pies & Gourmet Desserts, a bean pie company that launched in March of last year. On Sept. 17 of this year, she submitted a proposed ordinance to New Haven’s Board of Alders. The ordinance appeared as a communication Monday night’s full board agenda. It was not discussed during the meeting.

The ordinance, Ibrahim explained in a letter addressed to Board President Tyisha Walker­-Myers, proposes “to create a “Micro­Food Business Permit for MBE/SBI small businesses by reducing fees and streamlining the process of obtaining a permit to establish a food business from the City of New Haven Health Department.”

Specifically, that’s a business that rents space from a commercial kitchen, but grosses less than $250,000 a year. Under current city policy, those businesses must operate as commercial kitchens themselves, applying for clearance with the Fire Marshal, Department of Zoning, Regional Water Authority, and Building Department.

When applicants have gotten all of those signatures—a process that requires getting four different applications from four different departments, and a series of individual site visits—they head to the Health Department for a final inspection. At that stage, annual permitting fees are based on square footage: $150 for up to 1,500 square feet, $275 for 1,500 to 3,000 square feet, and $475 for over 3,000 square feet.

Those fees are currently due each May—even if a business has started in March or April, and just paid for a full year. Under the newly proposed ordinance, they will be prorated on a quarterly basis, to make it easier for startups to begin at any time during the year. They’ll also fall into a blanket fee of $75, as long as the kitchen is already certified.

“It tends to be very cumbersome, and honestly really unfair to startup micro-businesses,” she said in an interview on WNHH’s “Kitchen Sync” last week. “It wastes city resources. It wastes employees’ time. And for us as a city, time is money. We’re paying these employees.”

Ibrahim’s quest comes from personal experience. In March 2017, she began the process of moving operations into a downtown bakery (she asked that The Arts Paper not use the name), using its backroom kitchen for just four hours a week. It came on the heels of a major realization that she would have needed “$100,000 up front” to build a kitchen of her own. The bakery seemed like a good fit: it was run by a fellow fitness guru and soon friend, who left the space free in the afternoons.

But the process was bound in thick red tape. While the kitchen was already licensed for baking—the owner had actually just gotten re-certified six months earlier—it still required a series of new inspections from five city departments before Ibrahim was able to cook at all. Those required five distinct applications, and five separate visits from the city to scope out the kitchen.

Then Ibrahim discovered that she was going to be charged for the space of the whole shop—in the $275 range—even though the kitchen is only 300 square feet. Even a representative of the Business Department was flummoxed when she presented her case, explaining that she was “literally just putting pans in the oven and taking them out” for a few hours every week. 

He asked her if she was installing anything. Nope, she replied. What about implementing structural changes? Nope again.

“There was literally no reason for him to come down,” she said, recalling that he ultimately signed off without a visit. “But it just gave me an indication that they don’t really have an [idea of] ‘Okay, this is someone that’s renting an existing space, so this is the procedure that we have to go through.’ It just doesn’t exist!”

She didn’t have other options. A cottage food law, allowing people to cook in their homes, had been passed by the state legislature but was still sitting in committee (after a year’s wait period, it exited committee earlier this week). What was on the books was what she had to work with.

“I was like, ‘I got it done, it’s done, let’s go forward,’” she recalled. But a year later—as Mmm Pies was expanding to cafes and bakeries and Ibrahim looked for a new space—she had to do it all over again. And she decided it was time to change the law to support small businesses like hers. Ibrahim is her only employee—a phenomenon she knew was not unique to her.

“No one else should have to go through this,” she said. “I sat down, and I really thought, and I talked with some people … what was the things that was redundant and cumbersome, that we could take out and still keep in consideration the safety of the public, the safety of the space … and that’s still fair?”

She looked at how much businesses were making, putting $250,000 as a financial “cap” for the amount a micro-business was able to gross. She proposed removing redundancies on kitchens that are already certified with the city, meaning micro food business owners can bring a copy of the kitchen’s certificate to the Health Department, and pay a $75 fee across the board. She nixed ingredients that would necessitate a grease trap, in what she called a nod to the city.

And she reached out to members of the New Haven Food Policy Council and to her husband, Shafiq Abdussabur, who had written proposals before. Now, she’s waiting for the announcement of a public hearing, during which she hopes to pack the room. For her, the ordinance ties into the city’s 2018 Transformational Plan, busting food insecurity and poverty by lowering the barriers to entrepreneurship and economic development.

“I honestly believe that it is such a key to economic stability,” she said. “This is kind of like the beginning of the food policy strategy for making us a better city. And what better way to do that than make it easier for food entrepreneurs to start their businesses?”

To listen to the episodes of “Kitchen Sync” and "The Table Underground" with Mubarakah Ibrahim, click on or download the above audio.