What’s next for Fresno County’s professional home cooks after pilot program’s rejection? ^⁠24%

7/17/2026, 7:02:32 PM

Topics: Home Based Businesses, Food Safety, Entrepreneurship, Policy Making

Keywords: Mehko, Home Kitchens, Food Entrepreneurs, Pilot Program, Fresno County, Board Of Supervisors, California Restaurant Association, Cottage Food

BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Confirmation Bias, Appeal to Emotion, and Self-Serving Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 13% saturation with 232 hits. Analysis detected 1,677 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,785 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 36.7% and a BS Rank of ⁠24% (13,109 of 17,120 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 76.60% of the article peer group.

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What’s next for Fresno County food entrepreneurs wanting to serve customers out of their homes now that the Board of Supervisors shot down a pilot program that would’ve legalized that option for them?

Some say those cooks might just have to wait for a different board to take a second shot at passing the program — or, to be more exact, the same board, just with different members.

At least that’s what Cultiva La Salud Executive Director Veva Islas thinks.

Islas’ nonprofit has been one of the organizations pushing hardest locally for the county to opt into allowing what state law calls “Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations,” or MEHKOs.

The MEHKO advocate was disappointed with the board’s 3-2 vote at Tuesday’s meeting to kill the pilot — especially after all five supervisors voted in favor of the pilot in the first of two hearings on the program last month.

Board Chair Garry Bredefeld and supervisors Buddy Mendes and Nathan Magsig cast the three “no” votes that tanked the program, citing a variety of concerns — from increased traffic surrounding the in-home restaurants to dissatisfaction with the single inspection of MEHKOs allowed annually under state law.

“It’s either that they were incompetent and didn’t read the ordinance the first time and just approved it, or that they were just being lobbied by the (California) Restaurant Association, who was the most vocal in opposition, and then decided to waffle,” Islas said of the supervisors’ vote.

“Which also, to me, speaks volumes about their integrity.

“There is a lot to say about a board that unanimously approves something in its first reading and then dramatically shifts,” she added.

“I don’t think that this is a board that’s reasonable (or) that we could go back to and try to make any type of gain in terms of any logical arguments.”

But 2027 indeed promises at least two, if not three, new faces for the board.

Former Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims has already clinched the District 4 seat after a swift victory in the June primary and will take over for a retiring Mendes.

In November, Fresno City Councilmember Mike Karbassi will face off against Kerman Mayor Maria Pacheco in a quest for the District 1 seat as the current supervisor, Brian Pacheco, vies for a spot in the California State Assembly.

And if Magsig wins a runoff in his bid for State Senate this fall, the District 5 seat on the board will also open up next year.

Vong Mouanoutoua and Diane Pearce, who both currently hold office in Clovis, have already announced their candidacy in the event of a special election.

But not everyone was unhappy with the board majority’s decision on the pilot.

Several residents involved with the Sunnyside Property Owners Association urged the board not to approve the program without introducing more guardrails first.

“The Sunnyside Property Owners Association’s concerns were never about who would operate these businesses or who might benefit from them.

Our concerns were, and remain, focused on the neighborhood impacts of introducing commercial food operations into residential areas,” the association shared in a statement Friday, “including traffic, parking, noise, code enforcement, business licensing, and compatibility with existing neighborhoods.

“We believe those are legitimate public policy questions that deserved careful consideration before moving forward.”

And while any potential shifts in board dynamics remain months away, local food entrepreneurs are now left figuring out where Tuesday’s vote leaves them.

At least one told Fresnoland he’s already considering shutting down his business in the wake of the board’s decision.

Paul Samarin spoke in favor of the supervisors adopting the pilot at Tuesday’s meeting, alluding to the benefits it could bring his small food business, House of Paul , as he looks to scale up.

But he left the meeting feeling “heartbroken,” he said in an interview Thursday, and unsure of what comes next.

“That’s been a hard decision: to try to discern when the time is when you realize the door is closing, and you’ve just got to walk away from it,” he said, “or when it’s time to persevere and stay with it.”

Samarin launched House of Paul three years ago.

As a veteran living with PTSD, he said several jobs in the “civilian” world didn’t feel like a great fit.

That included anything from work in produce-packing plants to nonprofits.

“What does it matter if we produce 400,000 watermelons this month?

So what?”

he said.

“That doesn’t really satisfy any kind of personal need of contributing to this world.

Then, launching his food business changed all of that.

“Not only does the cooking provide a therapy for me,” Samarin said, “but it also allows me to kind of run my own show.”

It started with pastrami sandwiches.

He’s since taken on a variety of staples of Texas-style barbecue, making all his food from scratch.

He serves these at special events out of his catering trailer.

But his cuisine is labor-intensive and becoming more costly with the price of meat soaring.

His pastrami, for instance, is a 30-day process, and it’s a challenge to find enough shelf space for the volume of meat he needs to brine, even with the help of places like the Clovis Culinary Center .

For the last six months or so, Samarin had been talking with owners of potential brick-and-mortar locations, but found he fell short of most landlord’s income requirements.

So the opportunity to do more from his home kitchen for the time being offered a “glimmer of hope” — one that got extinguished this week.

Cooks like Samarin do have the option to sell a limited amount of prepared food out of their home kitchens through “cottage food” permits.

That is, in fact, one of the programs that has allowed Samarin to sell some of his creations, like sourdough bread, out of his home.

But MEHKO could’ve broadened the horizons for cooks who were, on one hand, ready to expand their offerings beyond the limited list of approved cottage foods , and, on the other, not quite ready to take the leap to opening a brick-and-mortar operation, Islas said.

“The promise of MEHKO was that people were going to be able to try menus,” she said.

“They were going to be able to test things.”

Why did the supervisors vote down the MEHKO pilot?

The proposed MEHKO pilot came after the county was awarded just under $155,000 in state grant money in 2024 to explore the feasibility of a local program.

Between $20,000 and $30,000 remain to be spent on the grant — money that Fresno County Public Health Director Joe Prado said will be expended “by the end of the contract term” in August.

“So we do not plan on sending any funding back to the State,” he added.

The two-year pilot would’ve allowed 66 MEHKO permits countywide.

Those entrepreneurs would have been capped at serving 90 meals a week, no more than 30 in a single day and roughly $100,000 in annual revenue (subject to yearly increases through the consumer price index).

The program had received unanimous support from the five-member board in its first hearing June 30, despite some contingencies.

Among those were a request from Bredefeld that staff look into whether the county could require one additional unannounced health inspection per year on top of the one annually required by the state.

Bredefeld decided to withdraw his support on Tuesday once county staff confirmed that wasn’t legally allowed under state law.

“You have one inspection here with no other inspection at all, unless there’s a complaint,” Bredefeld said.

“To me, that poses a great risk to the public.

I don’t think there are enough guardrails in place for this.”

Mendes also voiced concerns about dine-in options at MEHKOs.

But when county counsel asked if he would want to delay the item so they could look into placing restrictions on dine-in, Mendes declined.

“I’m already getting tired of hearing this,” Mendes said before the board moved forward with a vote.

The proposed pilot also received some pushback from groups like the California Restaurant Association.

The organization has made its voice heard on other local legislation in the past pertaining to food vendors, including when it supported higher fines for mobile food vendors in the City of Fresno.

Prior to Tuesday’s hearing, the statewide organization with a Fresno chapter submitted opposition letters to the county and voiced concerns at the board’s previous meeting.

“Efforts should be made by the County to nurture the brick-and-mortar restaurant community,” wrote Matt Sutton, the organization’s senior vice president of Government Affairs & Public Policy, in a July 14 letter, “not efforts that would effectively compromise public food safety and create an avenue for restaurant-like operations, but without all the responsibilities, costs, and restrictions.”

Multiple members of the Sunnyside Property Owners Association also voiced skepticism related to the pilot at Tuesday’s meeting, particularly related to increased traffic congestion in residential areas.

“I’m your common sense neighbor.

What are you thinking?”

said Heidi Nakayama, who has served as a representative in the association .

“You want another business on a residential street, a county street, where there’s residents, children, senior citizens, no sidewalks?

“You want 30 more cars to come?”

she added.

“Who’s making sure there’s not 50?

Samarin said he sympathizes with some of those concerns: “I’m 50 years old.

I don’t want my next-door neighbor hooting and hollering till 10 o’clock at night — random people showing up all the time, knocking on my door by accident.

“But they’re also negating the fact that this was supposed to be a test pilot,” he added.

“You can always go back on it.

It’s not like this set-in-stone thing.”

He also said it seems unlikely 30 cars would descend on a street to purchase the 30 permitted meals in a given day from the seller all at once — especially if some customers are families traveling together in one vehicle.

Islas said the irony is that county residents are already selling meals from their homes and will continue to do so — and that by passing on MEHKO, the supervisors gave up an opportunity to regulate it.

“There’s no quality control.

MEHKO was the quality control,” she said.

Samarin anticipates that same outcome as well.

“I drive up and down the streets going to Fresno, Kerman, westside, wherever, and you see these random tents popped up on the side of the road.