ZOEY and Andria Green, who are seven and eight respectively, only look innocent. With their baby faces and cunning, they managed to lure patrons to their illicit enterprise: a lemonade stand outside their home in Overton, Texas. The girls were in business for about an hour in June, selling popcorn and lemonade to raise money for a Father’s Day gift, before local police shut the operation down. Not only were they hawking without a $150 “peddler’s permit”, but also the state requires a formal kitchen inspection and a permit to sell anything that might spoil if stored at the wrong temperature. As authorities are meant “to act to prevent an immediate and serious threat to human life or health”, the officers understandably moved swiftly in.

Americans increasingly like to buy local food. The number of farmers’ markets offering local produce, cakes and jams around the country has more than doubled to nearly 8,300 in a decade. Sluggish job growth has also encouraged more people to start home-based businesses. But regulating the sale of goods made in ordinary kitchens is a “grey area”, says Emily Broad Leib of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic. So states are passing “cottage-food laws” allowing people to sell “non-potentially hazardous” foods, such as baked goods and almost anything canned, from their homes. But the rules are often odd or fussy, and no two states are alike.

Rhode Island, for example, allows farmers to peddle their wares but bans everyone else. In Oklahoma the law applies only to bakers, who may sell up to $20,000-worth of breads and cakes as long as the sales take place in their homes, not a market. In Wisconsin residents may sell only homemade canned goods, not baked ones, and sales must be capped at $5,000 a year. A lawsuit against a similar limit in Minnesota was dropped on June 16th after state lawmakers voted to raise the annual cap to $18,000 for sellers who register with the state and take a safety course. Some states explicitly ban internet sales, as products sold across state lines are subject to more stringent federal food laws.

Resistance to loosening the rules largely comes from health officials, who worry about the risks of unlicensed kitchens. But cottage-food laws have mushroomed in recent years without any boom in botulism, says Baylen Linnekin of Keep Food Legal, a lobby group. Advocates argue that raising sales caps and reducing red tape would not only help to satisfy a growing demand for all things artisan, but also encourage more small-scale entrepreneurs. Research from the Institute for Justice, a libertarian group, found that California’s more relaxed cottage-food law of 2013 launched more than 1,200 new businesses within a year. In Texas, where lawmakers eased home-made food rules in 2013, more than 1,400 people are now licensed to sell their treats from home.

Alas for the Green girls, lemonade is not covered by Texas’s cottage-food law, as it might spoil if it is not properly stored. But the pair have learned a valuable lesson about commerce and regulation. They discovered that if they gave the lemonade away free, but put a box on the table for tips, they could still make money because the “payments” thus became donations. Their father must be proud.