I am looking to start selling cupcakes when my daughter enters school in the fall and don't want to bake in my home. I am interested in renting kitchen space somewhere and am curious how the whole process works out for those of you who do it. Do you pay an hourly fee? Monthly rent?Do you have to work in off hours. Do you work out of a catering kitchen? Is it convenient? What kind of licensing do you need? Do you have a safe food handling license?
Any info would be helpful!!
Thanks!

There are a lot of different set ups, but in my area, we have shared kitchens. They already have their inspections, all I had to do was submit a list of ingredients used. The paperwork from the kitchen was used to get a business license, and I had to provide liability insurance. This specific place had different packages, but the more hours you bought on a monthly basis, the cheaper it is, with smaller packages, you have to work between 8-5, I believe, but bigger packages allowed you to work 24/7, you just have to sign up for the time. That also have a lot of different space, so you're not competing for time. Also, you have to get ServSafe in my area. Different places will work differently, say if you rent from a restaurant (I knew someone who baked the desserts for the restaurant and was able to use their kitchen as needed, but not sure about specific legalities), or rent from a church, etc. HTH!

We also use shared commercial kitchen space (in San Jose, CA) and we needed our business license, liability insurance, and ServSafe certificate before we could start working in the kitchen. The health dept here inspects each tenant of the commercial kitchen separately, since they need to ensure everyone is following proper procedures. We don't need to use off-hours because this facility was set up solely for people who need to rent space, but we do have to reserve our hours a few days in advance.

Each kitchen has a different pricing structure, in ours we have an annual fee, monthly rental costs for on-site storage, and an hourly charge for actual use of the kitchen.

thanks for the info! Sounds pretty ideal and not too complicated. I think finding a place around here will be the biggest challenge.