Lawmakers drafted a bill outlining new exemptions to the Wyoming Food Freedom Act, which, if passed, may allow homemade food items to be sold in restaurants and coffee shops.
“What we really wanted to do was to allow local producers to sell more easily everywhere in the state,” Representative Steve Johnson said.
The drafted bill, discussed during an Agriculture, State and Public Lands & Water Resources committee meeting on Tuesday, builds on prior rules outlined in the Food Freedom Act.
The Wyoming Food Freedom Act originally passed in 2015 and allows for private individuals to sell food products produced in a home kitchen.
The act requires sale to an “informed end consumer,” meaning that all homemade food must be clearly marked and separated from traditionally processed goods when sold at farmer’s markets or community co-ops.
Since its inception, the act has been revised to expand the kinds of products that can be sold and where that sale is permitted. The most recent discussion about revisions happened during the 2025 legislative session.
During the Tuesday discussion, committee members finalized language for a bill draft that would create an exemption allowing individuals to sell products at commercial locations outside of their homes, including restaurants. A prior revision to the act in 2020 allowed for producers of goods to sell them through local grocery stores or third-party “agents.”
Discussion around the proposed bill sought to address prior restrictions to Hippy Cow Creamery, a creamery operating under the Food Freedom Act in Cody. The creamery was previously instructed to cease sale of lattes that used their own raw milk due to the prepared nature of the product, which state health officials said required a commercial license to sell at their storefront.
“ What we're trying to do here is walk this line between the commercial license, which would then exclude something like raw milk, and say, ‘Okay, we'll give you the commercial license so you can run the coffee shop. The exemption is that we're not gonna treat the raw milk as an adulterant within that,’” Joe Budd, Deputy Director of the Wyoming Department of Agriculture, said at the meeting.
The drafted exemption would allow for individuals to sell products that would traditionally fall under the Food Freedom Act in areas the act doesn’t traditionally allow, namely commercial spaces that are not grocery stores and are not on the producer’s home property.
In this case, Hippy Cow Creamery would be permitted to sell prepared food items in their storefront while also benefitting from the reduced inspections offered through the Food Freedom Act.
The drafted bill creates a new term for these producers: a producer-retailer.
Those interested in utilizing the new producer-retailer title would be required to apply for the exemption that would be reviewed and either approved or denied by the director of the Department of Agriculture.
As committee members engaged in a two-hour-long discussion on the details of the potential bill draft, one fact became increasingly clear to members of the committee: This language is complicated and may not be accessible to the people that it intends to serve.
“ I own one of those stores, and this discussion that you guys have been having over the last two hours, we do it every day, all the time, trying to figure out, is this going to be legal? Is this going to work?” Steve Doyle, a farmer just north of Riverton, said at the meeting.
Doyle was influential in the initial push for implementation of the Food Freedom Act back in 2015. Today, what he is allowed to sell in a community “food freedom grocery store” in Riverton is unclear even to him.
“ There's lots left open to interpretation, and we're doing the best interpreting we can, but in the end, it's, ‘Yeah, throw it up there on the shelf and see if the inspector has an issue with it,’” Doyle said.
Committee members discussed possibly revisiting discussions on clarifying the Food Freedom Act in the future. The decision to draft the bill proposition was supported by all members of the committee, with the exception of Bob Davis and Karlee Provenza. If implemented, the exemptions to the act would go into effect in July 2027.
