Cottage Foodie Con - THE Conference For Cottage Food Producers!

Today I'm talking with Matt Rosen at Cottage Foodie Con. You can follow on Facebook as well. "CottageFoodieCon will be an annual premier event dedicated to supporting and empowering small-scale food entrepreneurs operating under cottage food laws. This conference serves as a vital hub for cottage food producers, policymakers, educators, and industry professionals to connect, learn, and grow. Through a combination of keynote speeches, workshops, networking opportunities, and an exhibitor trade show. The conference will foster business development, regulatory compliance, and innovation in the cottage food sector." Use Promo Code: CFCON25 and get 25% OFF (expires 10/31/25) www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Matt at The Cottage Foodie in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Good morning, Matt, how are you? I'm doing fantastic, Mary. How are you? Good. See what I did there? I didn't say your last name. Do you want to explain it really quick? Yeah. So I question my family. 00:26 Lineage so whether or not they are pronouncing our last name correctly because it's spelled just like Rosen R O S E N But it's actually pronounced rosine like there should be a Z in there or maybe two E's uh So yeah, so it's uh I respond to both Okay. Hey you probably works to does people or hey cookie guy. That's what seems to be uh Most popular here over the last five or so years since I started my college food business, so 00:56 Yeah. And uh your business is sergeant shortbread and it's really hard to screw that up. So the spelling is a little tricky. A lot of people mix up the spelling of sergeant. went with the, uh of course, spending 23 years in the military. went with the military version of sergeant, not the S A R G E N T that some people want to spell it. But, uh, so it's easy to pronounce, hard to spell. Yeah. I grew up thinking the English language was super simple. 01:26 And then I looked at other languages and went, no, we're just as messy as everybody else's languages. So, has been on my show twice, I think already. And he came back to chat with me this morning about the fact that he has spearheaded the Cottage Food Econ that's coming up in April of 2026. So tell me what you got going on, Matt. 01:52 Yeah, so it's a cottage food conference designed specifically for cottage foodies uh or cottage food entrepreneurs. And the premise behind it is like the classes and the sessions and everything about this conference is geared towards uh the business side of running a cottage food business. 02:15 A lot of people ask me like, can you have a cottage food conference? Every state, how can it be national? Every state is different and all these products. I'm like, easy. I'm just going to teach you the business side of running a cottage food business. And I'm not going to teach you how to make sourdough. You probably already know how to do that. And I'm not going to teach you about the laws in Tennessee. You should already know those because you're a cottage food producer in Tennessee. If you're not from Tennessee, you could care less what the laws are in Tennessee. 02:44 So yeah, so that's the premise behind uh the conference is that it's designed to help cottage food entrepreneurs with the business side of running a cottage food business. things like one of the classes is food photography using your iPhone. As we all know as cottage food entrepreneurs, we don't have enormous budgets to hire somebody to take professional pictures. So just starting out, we'll teach you how to do 03:13 great pictures and it's taught by a photographer. oh So she's going to teach us how to take, you know, she used the lighting and the angles and ah things like that. So it's going to be a hands-on workshop. So people are going to get to take picture. It might not be their exact product of what they're taking a picture of, but it's going to give them the idea of like what the angle should be and um whether you want direct lighting or maybe you want to pull a shade. If it's really sunny out, you might want to pull the shade so it's not quite as bright. So 03:42 Yeah, teaching things like that social media. We've got a few classes on social media uh One of them how to win at social media without being an influencer. So Yeah, and it's we have speakers coming in from gosh all over the country from California, Missouri, Colorado, Florida Pennsylvania Wisconsin and of course right here in the great state of Minnesota Fantastic so I have lots of questions the first one 04:11 The first one is what are the dates in April for this? It's April ...