Cooks' complaint

Sandy Taylor's friends rave about her sticky buns.

"They tell me they're so good you should sell these," says Taylor, 60, a retired lab technician who lives in West Philadelphia.

She spent 10 years perfecting the recipe, using her mother's instructions for the dough. "You should sell these," Taylor hears again and again.

And she would, too, if she could find a way to do it legally.

The city Department of Public Health requires that food intended for sale be made in a kitchen the department can inspect periodically.

Taylor is not the only person out there who has a tasty potential money-maker. Most are bakers like Christina Butler of South Philadelphia, who wants to sell her "baby cakes," a combination cake and doughnut that resembles a mini bundt cake. Others make spice mixes, pestos, or jams.

A business like Taylor's, if successful, could employ other bakers, as well as companies that make the raw ingredients she needs, people who design and print labels and boxes, marketing experts, packers, and shippers.

Indeed, Reuben Canada of South Philadelphia, who makes a ginger-green-tea beverage called Jin-Ja, says he will probably hire as many as 20 workers for his small business this year.

But many craft food producers complain that the city has not been friendly to their small start-ups. In fact, entrepreneurs like Taylor need approvals from at least three different city departments - public health, zoning, licenses and inspections - and those departments don't even have a category for this kind of business.

"So how am I to know which rules and regulations apply to me?" Taylor asks.

She says she's found it impossible to find rental space in a suitable commercial kitchen.

"Nobody is asking for a free ride from the city," says Eli Massar, who tried to operate a kitchen rental on South Street for food start-ups like Taylor's.

He had no shortage of customers (in fact, he had to turn Reuben Canada away). But after only 16 months in business, Massar says, he shut down his Philly Kitchen Share out of frustration. He felt defeated by multiple inspections, a plethora of confusing forms, and what Massar says is "an antagonistic approach."

Taylor wants to go the legal route, but in the absence of kitchen rentals, an unknown number of food producers operate under the radar - in home kitchens that the city health department doesn't know about and cannot inspect for safety.