Bay Area Site Offering Home Cooked Meals For Sale Amid Objections From Health Officials

OAKLAND (KPIX 5) -- This isn't your typical takeout. A few times a month, Renee Wash cooks up a feast at her house in Oakland, and then sells the food online though a startup called Josephine.com.

"It gives me an opportunity to live out a dream. And that dream is to feed people," Wash told KPIX 5 ConsumerWatch.

Think Etsy for food. Customers order online and then go to the chef's house to pick it up.

Most meals on Josephine range from $9 to $13, a deal for busy mom Cheryl Berger. "It's nice once in a while to not have to cook myself," Berger said.

"This is more than just food. It's also love," said Josephine co-founder Charley Wang

Wang said it's also about giving folks a taste of different cuisines. "A lot of our cooks, 33 percent of them, are first-generation immigrants. So when they're cooking food from their home countries, it's not the same as restaurant food," Wang told KPIX 5.

But health officials have some reservations about home-cooked takeout. "It's not allowed," said Ron Browder of the Alameda County Health Department. "It's against the law."

Browder said with the exception of candy, dried pasta and a few other non-refrigerated foods, all food for sale in California must be prepared in a commercial kitchen that meets state code and passes regular inspections.

"And I think they know the rules already," Browder said.

When asked about the rules, Wang said, "I would prefer not to talk about that."

Wang said his cooks do have access to a commercial kitchen, but they're not required to use it, something he chalks up to growing pains of a start-up, in the sharing economy.

"It's very much the same sort of loophole that like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft sort of worked with when they first started," Wang said.

Josephine said it does a background check on all its cooks and pays for a food handler's license. They also said they inspect the home kitchens themselves.

Why isn't the county shutting them down? Right now officials said they can't find them.