A Bay Area food start-up that's raising questions about the legality of selling food out of your home has arrived in Portland.

Josephine, the latest Bay Area startup to try its hand up north, wants to help you find dinner and also empower local home chefs to create their own small businesses.

Basically, here's how it works: a person cooks meals in their home, other people order those meals and come by and pick them up at dinner time. The chef gets 90 percent of the revenue and Josephine gets the rest.

Charley Wang, who founded Josephine in April 2015, says it's less like the "Uber for food" than it is the "Etsy for food."

"The big difference," he told us over the phone on the way to the annual company retreat in Truckee, California, "is that Etsy empowers their users."

Wang said his business is about "de-commoditized food" and giving communities control over their own food sources.

"The best way to sell home cooked meals," said Wang, "is not to sell to strangers."

With that in mind, Josephine helps its cooks learn how to reach out to, and feed, their own communities. "You know what your community loves," he said. "Let us help you do that."

But of course, it isn't that simple.

According to Berkeleyside, in California's Alameda County, Josephine has severely restricted its activities after cooks were served with cease-and-desist orders from environmental health regulators for illegal food sales.

Though Josephine conducts virtual home tours, interviews and health inspections of cooks' kitchens, and requires a food handler's permit be obtained by every cook, those things don't fulfill the requirements of most states' regulations around commercial cooking. In California, the startup came up against the Homemade Food Act, which Berkeleyside writes, "places tight limitations on the types of foods that can legally be prepared in a home kitchen."

In Portland, Josephine may run into similar problems.

Dave Martin with the Food, Pool and Lodging Health and Safety Program at the Oregon Health Authority is part of the group that oversees, you guessed it, food, pools, hotels and motels. While he hadn't heard of Josephine prior to our conversation, he had immediate concerns.

"When you prepare food for public consumption," Martin told us over the phone, "You need to do that in a restaurant under a license."

Martin said, with a few exceptions for things like baking wedding cakes, all commercial cooking must be done in a commercial kitchen.

"You can convert your garage into a commercial kitchen," said Martin, but a regular home kitchen won't meet the requirements, which include hand washing stations and certain dishwashing codes.

Wang is aware that Josephine isn't necessarily acting within the rules. In a blog post on Medium, he wrote, "Existing regulation has excluded and disenfranchised the cooks that feed our population."

Josephine has launched a petition to try to change the Homemade Food Act to be more inclusive.

Wang said it his goal to empower communities to work outside existing corporate food systems, and he also believes Josephine won't face the same legal issues in Portland that it's faced in Alameda County.

"One of the big factors that we looked into," said Wang about the choice to come to Portland, "is actually the legal and political climate."

So far in Portland, Josephine has around a dozen cooks, with more signing up almost every day according to Wang. For $6 you can order "Delicious Pancake Balls with Sides of Fruit Salad and Homemade Sausage!" to be picked up on Wednesday, August 25.

At least, you can for now.

-- Lizzy Acker

503-221-8052

lacker@oregonian.com, @lizzzyacker