An upcoming food safety training course will help explain a new Alabama law that allows anyone to sell non-hazardous foods directly to consumers.

The new Alabama Cottage Food Law took effect June 1, allowing homemade food to be legally packaged and sold without inspection from a local health department. However, for the safety of others, experts highly recommend those interested in baking and selling from home take a food safety class.

The Alabama Cooperative Extension Service will host a food safety class in Selma August 12 from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. at Alagasco, located at Highway 14 west. The class will go over how to safely produce foods in a home and those who complete it will get a certificate of completion.

“We have about 300,000 food borne illnesses reported every year through the Center for Disease Control so the purpose of them learning about it is to see what they can do to prevent that from happening,” said Janice Hall, a regional extension agent. “We don’t want them to be a statistic.”

Anyone who makes baked good at home must put a label on their foods that displays the person or business’ name, the address where it came from and state the food is not inspected by the Department of Public Health.

“At home you don’t have the commercial sinks and the sterilizers and all of that to make sure everything is sterilized,” Dallas County extension agent Callie Nelson said. “So what this is going to be training people on is steps they can take to ensure food safety in the products that they produce.”

Among the foods that can be sold directly to consumers under the new law are candies, jams and jellies, dried herbs, cakes, cookies, pastries, doughnuts, danishes, breads and other baked goods. Baked goods made with an ingredient that requires refrigeration, such as cakes with a whipped topping, barbeque sauces and soft or hard cheeses, cannot be sold directly to the consumer.

Under the Cottage Law, baked goods must be sold directly to the consumer and not through another avenue. For more information about the Cottage Law, call 415-8658.