Extraction versus Value Added Operation

I had a long, painful conversation with the Michigan Department of Agriculture (MDA) Food Safety Inspection people yesterday. By the end of the conversation, I feel that I was finally starting to understand the underlying principle in all of this.

In a nutshell...they consider farming, as in picking a fruit from a tree, collecting a basket of vegetables, or draining sap from a tree, to be the extraction of a raw material. As long as it is simply collected and brought to market they have little regulatory concern.

Any kind of value added operation to those raw materials, such as creating an apple pie, filtering honey, or boiling down maple sap, they consider to be a food processing operation and subject to full weight of their food safety regulations and licensing requirements.

It took me a while but now I've got it. I was just never aware of the massive regulatory difference between a bunch of grapes and grape jelly. Of course it makes sense and I'm glad that they are so vigilant in protecting public health. It just puts a major financial burden upon anyone who wishes to cross the gap from extractor to processor by doing something like making blackberry jelly and offering it for sale.

My understanding from growing up around the lumber industry is that value added is where the real money is made. The guy who cuts down the tree and sells the log doesn't make nearly as much off of the resource as the factory that turns the log into fancy hardwood bedroom suites. At the same time, the guy cutting the tree down has little in the way of investment or overhead when compared to the factory.

All of that leads me to the conclusion that I need to decide what it is that I intend to do here. With little investment I can go out and plant rows of tomatoes, pack the harvest in my car and go sit in the farmer's market in a row with all of the other farmers and their identical baskets of tomatoes. As for my beekeeping hobby, I would have to eat honey until it comes out my ears, give honey to all of my friends until it comes out of their ears and then dump the rest on the ground. The MDA considers the act of passing the honey through a strainer to remove the bits of wax as processing. Without investing in a licensed commercial kitchen I could not sell it.

Therefore I will now begin a big rethink of my plans with the centerpiece being the eventual investment in a proper food processing facility. Once I have it I will be able to do whatever I want. Until then you might not want to come around unless you really like honey!