New Food Companies

I spent most of Tuesday at the Making It In Michigan Conference in Lansing MI. It is an annual event that showcases the state's food entrepreneurs and their products - Yum! But more than a treat for the tastebuds, it's a testimony to the grit required to take a good (food) idea and get it into production - even if that production is small and local. The Product Center at Michigan State University helps people through the maze of regulations, laws, requirements and business issues that - in all honesty - they probably don't even want to deal with. They just want to make their product.

I have no issues with people being held to standards that ensure that their products won't kill others. But it seems that we've gone into overkill. How many times have you been sickened by eating at another person's home by their bad preparation of something? I suspect the answer is "0" to very infrequently. I'm not talking about ingesting something you are allergic to, but bad cooking skills or bad food products.

People who enjoy cooking for others seem to be a group that care that their audience both enjoys their food and comes back for more. So I would suspect they are pretty competent in terms of keeping people healthy who eat their food. Now I understand that scaling up production has a challenges, however I really wonder if every individual hoop that these food entrepreneurs had to jump through was really absolutely necessary....might food be less costly if regulation were less? Did regulation become necessary because food processing/production became a business? Hmmmm.....