Loading…
Loading…
About Mesa
Mesa is a marketplace for cottage food: the bread, cookies, jam, and pepper jelly your neighbors make at home. They list what they cook, you order ahead, and you pick it up or have it delivered nearby.
We run the storefronts and the payments, and we keep each state's cottage-food rules in order, so a listing only goes live where it's allowed.
Why we're here
People have always sold food from home: a table after church, a cooler at the market, a post that says “message me to order.” It works until it doesn't. Payments get lost in messages, batches sell out twice, and nobody is quite sure what the law allows.
Mesa gives those cooks a proper storefront and gives everyone nearby a way to find them. Our part is the checkout, the rules, and the paperwork. The cooking stays with the cook.
If you're buying
You buy from a person
Every listing names the kitchen it came from, with ingredients, allergens, and how it reaches you, before you pay.
Most of it is made after you order
Pickup and delivery times are confirmed when the maker accepts, so food reaches you close to the day it was made.
One basket, several kitchens
Order from more than one maker at once. Each sets its own pickup times or delivery area.
If you're cooking
Tell us where you cook
Your state decides which rules apply, and we only open a state once its rules are set up.
List what your state allows
Each listing is checked against the current rules, ingredients, allergens, and home-kitchen note included.
You stay the producer
You're responsible for the food you make, and we say so to your customers.
The hard part
Cottage food is legal in much of the country. What you're allowed to sell is a different question in every state, and the answer doesn't stay still.
Every state writes a different list
What homemade food can be sold, how it's labeled, whether it can be delivered, and how much you can earn aren't national questions. A jam that's fine in one state can be off-limits across the border.
The lists keep changing
Legislatures rewrite cottage-food laws. Caps move, categories open or close, and last year's checklist can be wrong this year.
So we keep a living rulebook
For each state we open, our team sets up the rules and publishes a new version when they change. Listings are checked against the current version, and past orders keep the version that approved them.
Straight talk
Eligibility on Mesa follows the current rulebook for each state. It isn't a promise that the rulebook covers every law that applies to a kitchen.
What Mesa does
Where we are
A state appears here once our team has set up its rules and published them. We never copy one state's list onto another.
Texas
OpenMesa is live in Texas for pickup and local delivery of shelf-stable homemade foods.
Say hello
What we don't