selling food to people

[UndercoverElephant]

I am thinking about running a business from a house I'm thinking of buying, and I don't know where to start regarding rules and regulations. What I'd like to do is grow edible fungi in a large shed, on waste cardboard. What I don't know is whether this counts as a "food business" and would have to be registered with the FSA, or what conditions I'd have to meet. I don't even know where to go to ask the questions, which is why I am asking here. Can you just grow stuff and sell it to people? What are the rules?

[JavaScriptDonkey]

From a purely business and tax perspective you could a lot worse than just asking your local tax office. They will run free courses on what you need to do to keep them happy.

For food specific stuff this happens when you Google.

https://www.gov.uk/food-business-registration

[clv101]

There's a case study of chap growing mushrooms in this report:
http://ecologicalland.coop/projects-small-successful

[stumuzz]

1/ Run it past your local EHO (Environmental health officer)
2/ Get your house a hygiene rating
3/ Be nice to your neighbours if you have customers calling at the house.
4/ Tell your insurance that you are running a business from the house
5/ Do a quick risk assessment to cover you against S.3 HASWA1974.
6/ Check that your public liability cover is sufficient.
7/ Ignore the Tax and VAT people until it is £76k turnover. Your biggest challenge will be to turn a liveable profit. Just take your cost of sales(which is everything you can think of) minus your sales and declare the profit via your self assessment.
8/ If you are using waste cardboard register the house with the environment agency as a waste transfer station (skip yard) for the reprocessing of waste.
9/ Think about personal indemnity insurance incase someone dies whilst eating one of your mushrooms.

Best of luck.

[jonny2mad]

a few years ago I had a complaint about selling things from my house even though its privately owned, it does depend on neighbours and how the house is positioned if you get complaints .

[UndercoverElephant]

Thanks for your responses everybody. I suspect I will decide not to go ahead as a food production business. Instead, I'm going to learn how to produce exotic fungi by feeding them waste materials such as cardboard and coffee grindings, and then I'll try to make money by teaching other people how to do it. I'm also planning on trying it with various edible species that are not recorded as being cultivated, but which in principle ought to be. I am guessing that in many cases, nobody has even tried.

I am not interested in competing with commercial mushroom farms, which tend to specialise in producing "shop mushrooms" and a handful of "exotic" non-British species which were traditionally cultivated in Japan/China, plus oyster mushrooms.

[Mark]

I'm going to learn how to produce exotic fungi by feeding them waste materials such as cardboard and coffee grindings.

Waste cardboard should be pretty easy to source. Starbucks rarely get a good press, but they do (or used to) give out free bags of coffee grindings.

Sounds like a great business idea - you ought to cultivate a market with the celebrity chef types so that you can make a healthy margin too. TV cookery programmes are always looking for something 'quirky'.

[UndercoverElephant]

I'm going to learn how to produce exotic fungi by feeding them waste materials such as cardboard and coffee grindings.

Waste cardboard should be pretty easy to source. Starbucks rarely get a good press, but they do (or used to) give out free bags of coffee grindings.

Sounds like a great business idea - you ought to cultivate a market with the celebrity chef types so that you can make a healthy margin too. TV cookery programmes are always looking for something 'quirky'.

I'm already dipping my toes in that pond. My "job" is as a roving mushroom-foraging tutor. I was on TV last year hunting for mushrooms with TV chef Matt Tebbut, and I also had a big-name TV cookery star as a customer for a birthday foraging event (wish I could say who, but that would be bad form.)

Anyway...this would be an obvious sideline, and something I can do during the times of year when there's not much foraging on the agenda.

Regarding the cardboard, corrugated is best for growing fungi on, because it allows air circulation. But any cardboard will do, including very low quality stuff. The only problem is that I have to be sure it does not contain any toxic dies, for example. It needs to be unprinted. Although I'm still guessing it can't be that hard to source unprinted waste corrugated cardboard.

[JavaScriptDonkey]

7/ Ignore the Tax and VAT people until it is £76k turnover. Your biggest challenge will be to turn a liveable profit. Just take your cost of sales(which is everything you can think of) minus your sales and declare the profit via your self assessment.

That is terrible advice. Many things you can't think of can be tax deductible including IIRC running a company bicycle.

The LTO course will be FOC and are usually very well attended.

[Oxenstierna]

Instead, I'm going to learn how to produce exotic fungi by feeding them waste materials such as cardboard and coffee grindings, and then I'll try to make money by teaching other people how to do it.

Let us know how you get on - I've tried growing oyster mushrooms on coffee grounds but with no success It got to the mycellium stage but then nothing.

The hardest thing was getting the coffee grounds (in the cafes I asked I was fobbed off with "I'll need to ask my manager. Can you come back." so I'd be up for trying cardboard next time.

[UndercoverElephant]

Instead, I'm going to learn how to produce exotic fungi by feeding them waste materials such as cardboard and coffee grindings, and then I'll try to make money by teaching other people how to do it.

Let us know how you get on - I've tried growing oyster mushrooms on coffee grounds but with no success It got to the mycellium stage but then nothing.

The hardest thing was getting the coffee grounds (in the cafes I asked I was fobbed off with "I'll need to ask my manager. Can you come back." so I'd be up for trying cardboard next time.

I've never tried it at all, and intend to start with cardboard. I've never really had enough space to do it until now.

[Oxenstierna]

I've never really had enough space to do it until now.

Best of luck and if you do manage to raise some mushrooms please do post some pics on this forum.

[westcoastreticence]

I'm with JSD regarding advice to ignore VAT and tax.
One of the benefits of having a small business indeed I would say a specific reason to set one up is the VAT & tax benefits. Things you can claim VAT back on and put against tax include
Fuel for your car/van atv/tractor
a % of elec and oil/gas bills
clothing (PPE)
tools
materials wood, wire,nails buckets spades ..................
training ref books
membership of various bodies e.g. quality schemes
paper, stamps, all sorts of office supplies pens staples.......
every few years 3/4 you can claim a PC and printer say a 500 pound laptop the VAT will be about a 80 quid

You get the idea the benefits from having a small business are many maximising the benefits of a hobby, interest, separate income stream, who knows it may grow into full time job. Minimise the amount you pay the gov to spend on stuff you dont agree with.

It is also good for the economy and can be very beneficial to the local community and may stimulate interaction at a local level which is generally all to the good regardless of how things pan out.

On a related topic I have tried and failed several times to grow mushrooms over the years, kits, starter packs, rotting straw down no success.

2011 got a couple of cows and back end of the year the back field had hundreds of them big flat light coloured about 10cm in dia I'd never seen a mushroom in that field in 20 years but only had sheep till now. Never managed to identify them 100% but will this year. I have no idea where the 'spore' (I think thats the term) came from a neighbour about quarter of a mile away has cows too and he has them in his field, or does it just float around? any ideas, also good book to buy on identification or website would be appreciated.

[UndercoverElephant]

2011 got a couple of cows and back end of the year the back field had hundreds of them big flat light coloured about 10cm in dia I'd never seen a mushroom in that field in 20 years but only had sheep till now. Never managed to identify them 100% but will this year. I have no idea where the 'spore' (I think thats the term) came from a neighbour about quarter of a mile away has cows too and he has them in his field, or does it just float around? any ideas, also good book to buy on identification or website would be appreciated.

I'm the resident expert at wildmushroomsonline.co.uk.

The best book, still, is Roger Phillips "Mushrooms". Still the best in terms of the photography, but another book came out last year that includes at least 1000 more species. These are illustrations rather than photos, and this isn't always quite as good. The new book is Collins/Bukzaki, and is currently still only available as a hardback. I recommend Phillips, which goes for a tenner from DODGY TAX AVOIDERS. Very good value.

As for the mushrooms in your field...I need a photo. Fungal spores float around, sometimes great distances. If the habitat is right, they'll find it. They then have to compete with all the other that have found it, and the one that competes best in that specific environment will win.

[UndercoverElephant]

wcr,

Maybe we can narrow it down. These are links to my own (out of date, needs to be replaced) guide to fungi. From what you've said, they most likely to belong to one of the following groups:

http://www.wibberley.org/fungiforaging/ ... m#Parasols
http://www.wibberley.org/fungiforaging/ ... m#Agaricus
http://www.wibberley.org/fungiforaging/ ... #Fieldcaps

Is that close, or completely wrong?

UE