Here, in the state’s largest city, the conditions that led to the law are in plain view.

Corey Polyoka, 30, and Hannah Ragan, 31, help run Foodshed, a critically acclaimed group of restaurants and cafes that has refined Baltimore’s seafood-heavy cuisine. Mr. Polyoka partners with the chef Spike Gjerde, managing the family of small locally-sourced businesses that include the Obama-endorsed Woodberry Kitchen.

Mr. Polyoka and Ms. Ragan have over 265 employees, including dishwashers, bartenders, baristas, managers and chefs. Around 85 percent of their workers are millennials or younger.

The company offers health care options to all employees, but has strained to square those costs with the scrambled politics of the Affordable Care Act and the right retirement packages. Over the last two years, independent financial advisers and banks have pitched cumbersome and overpriced retirement plans that do not suit Mr. Polyoka’s designs for Foodshed. The new law would allow Foodshed to work around that kind of dead end by using state-appointed private money managers.

“It can be very tricky to come up with the plans, and it can be very costly to administer it for the business because of the management of them, the turnover of them, the matching of them,” Mr. Polyoka said. Any kind of uniform retirement planning approach at Foodshed “needs to have the personality to match the company culture,” he said.

Ms. Ragan, who trains and handles personnel matters at the restaurants and cafes, says she talks to her staff about negotiating benefits every day. She wants Foodshed to be a place where those in their 20s and 30s think about “making their lives here.”