Many people find happiness with cooking businesses.

If you enjoy cooking or baking and feel comfortable giving others your food, you might want to start your own home food business.

This kind of business can come in many forms – you might make specialty food products and sell them online, or you can be a caterer or a personal chef. Let’s look at a few possibilities.

Specialty food

This is one of the easiest food businesses to start. If you make the world’s greatest biscotti or homemade jam, you might consider selling it online or in the “real world”.

If you decide to sell your food product online, you can do it on Ebay or through your own website. You might also offer recipes, or several flavors or varieties of product. You might decide to keep it simple and offer the dry mix of a particular recipe so the customer can make the product at their convenience at home.

There are some limitations to be aware of, and these vary from area to area. There might be local restrictions on selling food, or restrictions based on where the food is produced. Make sure you pay attention to these rules and restrictions before you make food and sell it. Often, there are loopholes (like selling a mix) you can discover that allow you to create a small business from the comfort of your own kitchen.

Catering

Many entrepreneurs have started catering businesses from home. If you are always called upon to cook the food for special events and you have particularly good recipes, you might be halfway in business already. In addition, if you have a large group of family and friends, you might also have a built-in client base.

To run a catering business, you have to have a kitchen to work in. Most county and state laws restrict making food from your home and carting it to another location. But you can always rent kitchens to use, such as church kitchens and the kitchens at schools and the like.

This is an ideal business for you because you can choose the jobs you want to work on and reject the others. You can have a lot of control over your work schedule until the event itself, when you might work a few hours before and a few hours after the event.

Personal chef

Personal chefs cook food for people in their own home. This is an excellent choice for the cook who has the skill to be a caterer but no permanent kitchen to use. By cooking the food in the client’s home, you circumvent that problem.

Most personal chefs offer two primary services – they will cook a special meal in someone’s home for them to eat right then, and they cook food for a family or person to eat throughout the week. In that case, you will cook or pre-prep several meals and leave them in the fridge or freezer for the customers to eat later.

More than the other options, working as a personal chef requires that you have some cooking training. If you have no formal training, it can’t hurt to take a few classes. Having a culinary degree isn’t necessary, but you do need to have some training under your belt before you sell yourself as a professional chef.

These jobs might not be jobs that you work exclusively at home, but all of them have a focus at home with some work needed off-site. In that way, they are ideal for people who wants to work at home but needs to get out and about now and then too.