Your kitchen, a shared kitchen, or a copacker

Where you make it determines what you are allowed to sell, and the answer is rarely the kitchen you already have.

Your own kitchen is usually not an option

Home kitchen production is permitted for some foods under state cottage food rules, and acidified foods are generally excluded from those rules precisely because the hazard is real.

So for most hot sauce, a home kitchen is not a route to a sellable product regardless of how clean it is. Confirm it for your state before planning around it, because this is the assumption that wastes the most time.

Shared commercial kitchens

A licensed space rented by the hour or the shift. This is how most small producers start and it is usually the right answer.

What to check: whether the facility's licensing covers acidified food production, what equipment is included, whether you can store product and packaging there, and who else uses it and for what. That last one is an allergen question and a scheduling one.

And extraction. A kitchen without good ventilation becomes unworkable the first time you reduce a hot batch, and it affects everyone else in the building. That is a common reason a shared kitchen stops renting to a hot sauce maker.

Copackers

Someone else makes it to your recipe in their facility. It removes the kitchen problem and the equipment problem and usually requires volumes well above a first run.

It also hands over the daily control of your product, and the specification you agree is the only thing holding the result to what you intended.

Choosing

Shared kitchen to start, copacker when production becomes the constraint on sales rather than the other way round. The mistake is going to a copacker early for convenience and discovering the minimum run is more bottles than you can sell.

Whichever you pick, the process authority evaluates the process as actually performed in that facility. Changing where you make it can mean revisiting the filing.

References