How to start a meal prep business in California

California has two home-kitchen routes and neither was built for meal prep. The first is the cottage food operation. The Department of Public Health keeps the approved cottage food list and describes a cottage food operation as preparing and packaging certain non-potentially hazardous foods in a private home kitchen. Nothing that has to be kept cold for safety is on that list.

There are two classes. A Class A operation sells home-kitchen prepared foods directly to the public, including orders taken by phone or over the internet and fulfilled in person, by mail or by a third-party delivery service, with current maximum gross annual sales of $75,000. A Class B operation may also sell indirectly through restaurants and food markets, currently at $150,000. Both register with, or take a permit from, the local environmental health department: CDPH itself does not permit or register cottage food operations.

For a meal prep menu the list decides it. Grilled chicken, beef, salmon, cooked rice, cooked vegetables held cold, yogurt and cheese are potentially hazardous foods. They are the whole product. Cottage food is a real business for granola, seasoning blends, cookies, jam and dry mixes; it is not a route to a weekly meal plan.

The second route is the microenterprise home kitchen operation, created by Assembly Bill 626 and effective from January 1, 2019. It is a small restaurant run by a resident out of a private home. CDPH is blunt about how it reaches you: individuals may apply for a MEHKO permit only in those counties where an ordinance or resolution has been adopted allowing MEHKOs to operate there, and CDPH tells you to check the current status with the local environmental health agency. It is a county-by-county map, so the first call is that agency, not Sacramento.

Los Angeles County is one of the jurisdictions that adopted it. The Board of Supervisors authorized MEHKOs in May 2024 and Environmental Health began issuing permits on November 1, 2024, across the county except in Pasadena, Long Beach and Vernon, which run their own environmental health departments. The county's own page gives an initial application review fee of $597 and, through December 31, 2026 or until the funds run out, a one-time subsidy waiving that fee for up to 1,000 permittees. The permit fee itself, and the current figures, are on the county's MEHKO pages.

Then read the limits in Health and Safety Code section 113825, because they are what decides whether this fits. Food must be prepared, cooked and served on the same day. No more than 30 individual meals a day, and no more than 90 a week. Sales go directly to consumers and never to a wholesaler or retailer. There may be no more than one full-time-equivalent food employee who is not a family or household member. Gross annual sales are capped at $100,000, adjusted yearly for inflation; CDPH's adjustment table puts the limit at $110,442 from January 1, 2026.

Cook on Sunday and deliver on Monday and you are outside the same-day rule. That one line is why most people who look at MEHKO for meal prep end up renting commercial kitchen time instead. A MEHKO is also, by statute, neither a catering operation nor a cottage food operation, so you cannot run the three together to get around a limit.

Meals built on meat, poultry, fish, dairy or cooked rice have to be made in a kitchen that meets the California Retail Food Code and holds a permit from the environmental health agency for its address. In practice that is a shared commercial kitchen or a space of your own.

A shared-use commercial kitchen, often called a commissary, rents cooking time and cold storage by the hour or the month. It is the usual starting point: the building already meets the construction and equipment rules, and you pay for the hours you cook. Los Angeles County permits shared kitchen complexes through its Specialized Food Services Program, so ask the operator which permit covers you and which you have to hold yourself.

Leasing your own space buys you the schedule and room to grow, and costs you plan check, a build-out and a longer wait. Talk to the environmental health agency before you sign a lease. They will tell you what the space needs to pass, and a building that cannot get a grease interceptor or the right ventilation is a lease you do not want.

Food permits in California are issued locally, by the county environmental health agency or, in a few cities, by the city's own. Los Angeles County's process is a fair model for the rest. If you are buying an existing restaurant and are not doing construction that needs a building permit, you contact the district office nearest the kitchen and take over the public health permit. If you are building a new kitchen or making major modifications — anything that replaces or adds equipment or fixtures in a food preparation area — you go to the Plan Check Program first.

Plan check runs in a fixed order. You check with the local planning and building department that a food business is allowed at the address and find out what else applies there, such as a grease interceptor or accessibility work. You draw floor plans against the county's Retail Construction Guide and submit them with specification sheets for equipment, ventilation, water heaters and floor and wall finishes. The health department approves the plans, then building and safety approves them, then you build. After construction you get final approval from building and safety, then ask the health department for its final inspection. The permit is issued once the public health permit fee is paid.

Fees change and differ by county and by the kind of facility, so get the current number from the agency rather than from a guide. Los Angeles County asks you to contact its Permits and Licensing Program for the current fees and for which applications your model needs.

Two separate things, and people mix them up. Health and Safety Code section 113947.1 says a food facility that prepares, handles or serves non-prepackaged potentially hazardous food must have an owner or employee who has passed an approved and accredited food safety certification examination, and that there must be at least one at each facility. One certified person cannot cover two facilities. Unlike some states, California does not require that person to be present during all hours of operation. A facility that starts up, changes hands, or loses its certified person has 60 days to comply.

Section 113948 covers everyone else. A food handler must obtain a food handler card within 30 days of being hired and keep it valid for as long as they do the job; the card lasts three years and is recognized throughout the state, and it comes from an ANSI-accredited training provider. The course and examination are designed to take about two and a half hours, the exam has at least 40 questions and needs 70% to pass, and the statute requires that at least one course be available for no more than $15 including the card. The employer counts the time spent on training and the examination as compensable hours. The facility keeps a record for each food handler and shows it to the inspector on request.

One exception worth checking: jurisdictions that ran their own food handler program before January 1, 2009 sit outside the state scheme and run their own. Ask your county which applies before you buy a course for the whole team.

Wholesale changes what you need, and the change is not small. A MEHKO may not do it at all: the statute allows sales directly to consumers and specifically not to a wholesaler or retailer. A cottage food operation needs Class B registration before it can sell indirectly through restaurants and food markets, and even then only foods on the approved list.

Beyond that, producing packaged food for other businesses to resell is manufacturing, and it is regulated by CDPH's Food and Drug Branch rather than by your county. Ask them what your model needs before you agree to supply a gym chain or a grocer. A wholesale contract signed against the wrong permit is an expensive way to find out.

Decide how the business is set up and file with the Secretary of State. Then budget for the one California cost that surprises people: the Franchise Tax Board charges every LLC doing business in or organized in California an annual tax of $800, due whether or not you traded, until the LLC is canceled. The first year's payment is due by the 15th day of the fourth month after you file with the Secretary of State.

You also need to be registered with CDTFA before your first sale; the sales tax section below covers what you are registering for and why the answer matters to your prices. Get an Employer Identification Number from the IRS before you hire, open a separate business bank account, and arrange insurance. Shared kitchens and wholesale customers normally want to see general and product liability cover, and you need commercial auto cover the day you start delivering.

California taxes prepared food, and CDTFA Regulation 1603 is where the lines are drawn. Tax applies to all sales of hot prepared food products unless otherwise exempt, and a hot prepared food product is one prepared for sale in a heated condition and sold at any temperature above the air temperature of the place where it is sold. Merely heating a food counts as preparing it, and food intended to be sold hot stays a hot food even if it cools on the way.

Cold food sold to go is the harder case. Regulation 1603 sets out the 80-80 rule: a seller who meets both of its criteria charges tax on cold food products in a form suitable for eating on the premises even when they are sold as a take-out order, though since April 1996 such a seller may elect to account separately for those to-go sales. Chilled meals that the customer reheats at home can land on either side of that line depending on how they are sold.

So ask CDTFA how your menu is treated before you set prices, and take the answer to your accountant. Nothing here is tax advice, and the answer decides whether tax sits on top of your price or comes out of it. In Mealforma the tax rate and whether prices are shown tax-inclusive are settings you change yourself, so a ruling from CDTFA takes a minute to apply rather than a rebuild.

Customers want to know what is in a meal; customers with allergies have to. Federal law names nine major food allergens: milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans and sesame. Every label should carry the ingredients and the allergens, and if you make a nutrition claim you need the numbers behind it.

Print nutrition from the recipe you actually cooked, not from the recipe you meant to cook. That sounds obvious until a supplier substitutes an oil and nobody updates the label. In Mealforma the allergens flow from each ingredient through the recipe version to the printed label, so a kitchen that cooked version 4 cannot ship a label from version 3. No software certifies a meal allergen-free and none should claim to: the label is your statement, and a human approves it.

Potentially hazardous food has to be kept at or below 41°F, with a short allowance for preparation, cooking, cooling and transport of under 30 minutes. Health and Safety Code section 113996 also lists potentially hazardous foods held during transportation among the foods that may be held at or below 45°F. That is the margin you are working inside on a delivery run, and it is not much of one.

California then makes it hard in two different ways. In the Central Valley a summer afternoon between Bakersfield and Sacramento will beat an under-packed cooler, so the ice and the insulation have to be sized for the last stop on the route, not the first. In Los Angeles County the problem is not heat but distance: a run that takes in Long Beach, the Westside and the San Fernando Valley is a long time in traffic on the 405 and the 5, and the route has to be built from that day's orders rather than driven in the order they came in.

Set delivery days and a cut-off, load the vehicle in reverse stop order, and tell customers a window they can plan around so nothing sits on a doorstep all afternoon. A photo at each drop settles most of the arguments. In Mealforma, delivery zones, fees and cut-off times are settings rather than code, so you can drop a zone that is losing you money at the end of the week.

Most meal prep businesses sell by the week. Customers pick a plan — 10 meals, 15 meals — choose their meals before a cut-off and receive them on set days. The cut-off is what makes the business work: it tells you exactly what to buy and cook before you have spent anything.

Cost each meal from its recipe, including packaging and labels, then add kitchen rent, labor, delivery and card fees per meal before you choose a price. California's labor costs and the $800 annual LLC tax both belong in that number. Subscriptions smooth the weekly swings and make purchasing predictable; one-off orders and add-ons fill the gaps.

Once orders come in every week, the job is keeping the menu, the cut-off, the kitchen's quantities, the labels and the routes in step. Mealforma is meal prep software built for that: an online store with weekly subscriptions, production quantities worked out from locked orders, labels printed from the recipe version the kitchen cooked, and each day's delivery route. It is a flat monthly price with no percentage of your sales, and each business runs on its own database.

What it does not do is the part this guide is about. Mealforma does not certify anything, does not obtain your permit, does not file your returns and is not legal or tax advice. The county, CDPH, CDTFA and your own accountant do that. The software is for the week after they have all said yes.