[P6te]

All,

A few weeks ago we engaged Environmental Health to understand the requirements and to know what we can and cannot do.

The key thing they were interested in was traceability. If you are selling to friends and family you know exactly where all the produce has gone whereas 'Farm Gate Sales' is potentially selling to people you don't know and traceability is no longer there.

However, if we have our pigs slaughtered at a registered slaughter house, butchered and packed by a registered butcher and we then sell straight onto the end customer whether it be friends and family or Farm gate Sales Environmental health are happy. (Trading standards are potentially a different subject and I am not sure of there requirement so am not going  there in this post).

We also enquired about making our own sausages and selling them on and surprisingly with relatively small changes we can do that too. There are a few 'paperwork challenges' along the way but in essence 'all' we need is the addition of a 'Teal unit' in the kitchen.

Even though we have cats and dogs, as long as we clean down and prepare the area (and from that point onwards exclude cats and dogs) we can then make our own sausages to sell.  However, the grey area comes with the quantity you plan on doing.  As long as only a certain percentage of the pig is being sausaged and the rest is sold as it came from the registered butcher / packer it is fine.

Ironically I asked the question, if we were a B&B and wished to serve cooked breakfast, could we serve our own bacon (as in we cured it), our own home made sausages and eggs from our hens?  The answer was bacon - yes, sausages - yes, eggs - NO!!  Stupid as it seems eggs served in this way have to be graded and ungraded eggs can't be used!!

Hope this helps.

Pete