Colorado’s Tamale Act Could Bring Home-Kitchen Food Businesses Out of Shadows

For Denver caterer Alejandro Flores-Muñoz, growing up, it was cheesecakes and flan that paid for school uniforms and youth soccer registration.

Flores-Muñoz watched his mother sell the desserts out of their home kitchen after the two arrived in the United States in the late 1990s. A single parent working a minimum-wage job, she needed extra income. Like many immigrants before her, she turned to what she knew: food.

Cheesecakes and flan baked at home moved through quiet networks — coworkers, neighbors, friends — bringing in just enough extra money to cover expenses a single paycheck couldn’t stretch.

“We were able to make ends meet because of making food from our home kitchen,” he tells The Latino Newsletter.

Perhaps inspired by his mom’s work ethic, Flores-Muñoz went on to launch his own food-based business, Combi Taco Catering. But instead of selling antojitos to neighbors on the weekends, he secures lucrative government contracts to prepare meals for hundreds of people daily. After realizing his own success, he wants to see other immigrant microbusiness owners take their home kitchen side hustles selling carnitas, burritos, or tamales and turn them into profitable enterprises.

Which is why Flores-Muñoz was encouraged to learn that Colorado lawmakers are considering House Bill 26-1033, known as the Tamale Act, which would amend Colorado’s cottage food law to allow certain refrigerated and hot-held foods, including meat-based dishes that are commonly sold within Latino immigrant communities.

The bipartisan measure, introduced by Majority Leader Monica Duran (D) and Representative Ryan Gonzales (R) and supported by Governor Jared Polis (D), would also eliminate the state’s $10,000 annual revenue cap on cottage food producers.

Under the proposal, sellers of temperature-controlled foods would complete food-safety training focused on time-and-temperature control, while local health departments would retain authority to inspect in response to complaints and issue penalties for violations.

“We want to make sure people can come out of the shadows and support themselves,” Polis told reporters in a recent press conference in which he pledged his support of the bill.

Colorado is not the only state reconsidering what “cottage food” can mean.

Across the country, lawmakers have been revisiting the laws governing home-based food businesses. Many states still limit cottage food sales to shelf-stable goods such as baked items, jams, or dry mixes. Others have experimented with broader frameworks. 

Wyoming’s Food Freedom Act allows wide direct-to-consumer sales, while Arizona expanded its law in 2024 to allow certain temperature-controlled foods. Meanwhile, in California, the state’s Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation law, enacted in 2019, allows residents to operate small-scale restaurants out of their homes where counties opt in. One recent example of the program’s potential is Granada, a buzzy coffee shop operating out of a home in Los Angeles’s Angelino Heights neighborhood.

The economic stakes of such legislation extend beyond tamales. Latino entrepreneurs are especially prominent in the food industry, from restaurants and catering to street vending and small food manufacturing. This burgeoning group of business owners is among the fastest-growing in the United States, with roughly 5 million Latino-owned businesses nationwide generating more than $800 billion in annual revenue. In addition, Latino consumers now wield more than $4 trillion in purchasing power, according to the Latino Donor Collaborative’s research on the U.S. Latino economy.

As that market has expanded, small food businesses rooted in immigrant communities have often stepped in to serve regional dishes and traditions that large restaurant groups or corporations have historically been slower to adopt.

Long before social media entered the picture, cooks in immigrant communities were already selling food through word-of-mouth networks to others from back home looking for familiar flavors. One famous example of this tradition came in the early 1990s, when Oaxacan immigrant Fernando Lopez Sr. found initial success selling mole and tlayudas door-to-door to other Oaxaqueños in Los Angeles. That hustle eventually grew into a tiny Koreatown restaurant that became Guelaguetza, now one of the country’s most celebrated Mexican restaurants and a James Beard America’s Classic.

Flores-Muñoz’s mother started off similarly, knocking on doors with cheesecakes and flan in tow.

As those networks moved online, so have the sales.

By the early 2010s, online forums like Facebook Groups had begun functioning as digital tianguis, where individuals sold everything from menudo and carnitas by the pound to fresh produce like mangos. When Facebook launched Marketplace in 2016, the feature simply centralized activity that was already happening.

For Isidro Salas, the son of a longtime San Jose taco truck owner who now lives in Denver, the scale of those businesses became harder to ignore during the pandemic. Salas grew up working weekends in his parents’ truck, La Chiquita, which operated in East San Jose for more than 25 years. He now shares taco-related content to more than 39,000 followers on TikTok under the handle 10,000 Tacos in the hopes of elevating the voice of the taquero.

“When the pandemic hit, it just exploded,” he says of the home-based food vendors he began seeing circulate online.

For entrepreneurs like Flores-Muñoz, that ecosystem is both familiar and newly visible.

He now documents his own journey on TikTok, where he shares videos about running a catering company and navigating the business side of food service. He goes over details on licensing requirements, securing contracts, and letting folks know what the Tamale Act could mean for aspiring entrepreneurs. Flores-Muñoz recently shared with his followers that his company won a bid to produce hundreds of meals a day for the unhoused.

But opportunities like that, he says, only became possible once his company had the licenses and insurance required to operate formally, which is why Flores-Muñoz thinks the Tamale Act is a win-win for businesses like his and Colorado. 

“If they are selling to their neighbors, to their family, to their co-workers, that is a very limited market,” Flores-Muñoz says. “At times, that's all you need. Sometimes, people just want to sell an extra $500 a month. However, it is not enough to grow into an actual, legitimate business. So if we equip people with the right tools when it comes to licenses and insurances, then they will be exposed to a higher clientele.”

Serena Maria Daniels is a Chicana journalist based in Detroit and the founder of Midwest Mexican. Her bylines have appeared in Reuters, NPR, HuffPost, the Chicago Tribune, and The Detroit News, and she is the former editor of Eater Detroit and the founder of Tostada Magazine.

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