A Legal Guide for Minnesota Botanical Producers

Produce farmers, cottage food producers, body care product vendors – are you growing / making and selling a tea? A salve? A tincture? All three – and maybe more variations? Do you know the laws and regulations surrounding these ‘botanical’ products?

Join Chloe Johnson, staff attorney for Farm Commons on this free Zoominar as she explains the nuances in the laws and walks you through the newly developed “Legal Guide for Minnesota Botanical Producers.”

This guide helps botanical producers make informed decisions about how to best market and manufacture your products to avoid unknowingly triggering additional product regulations. Familiarity with dietary supplement regulations will allow botanical businesses to continue to thrive. Botanical products can exist in a gray area between food and dietary supplement regulations. Botanical producers unaware of dietary supplement regulations risk violating labeling, cGMP, or marketing rules.

The guide includes advice on whether botanical products qualify under Minnesota’s ‘product of the farm’ exclusion from licensing, Minnesota’s ‘cottage foods law’ exemption from licensing, sales tax, wild foraging for the plants, and more.

The Twin Cities Metro Growers Network is proud to co-sponsor this Minnesota Farmers’ Market Association event.

Registration: It’s free to attend. Registration required to receive the Zoom link. Click here to register.

About Chloe Johnson

Chloe Forkner Johnson is Farm Common’s Staff Attorney. She has a dozen years of legal experience working with clients and in advocacy positions. As an agricultural attorney, Chloe has advised farmers on small business formation, zoning, and real estate issues. At Farm Commons, Chloe ensures the agricultural community receive sharp legal analysis as she writes newsletters, books, guides, and supports curriculum development.

Chloe comes from a farming background, having farmed for many seasons on diversified vegetable and flower farms in her home state, Georgia, and North Carolina. She’s worked at the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, providing technical assistance to farmers on GAP certification and Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) compliance. Chloe also proudly served as a Public Defender early in her legal career and later worked to develop equity programs for lawyers and court systems with a nonprofit in Raleigh, NC. Chloe earned her bachelor’s degree from New College of Florida and her law degree from the University of Georgia School of Law in Athens, GA. Chloe lives in a community on land traditionally part of the territory of the Saponi people in the Piedmont of what is now the state of North Carolina.

The Twin Cities Metro Growers Network is a collaboration between SFA and the University of Minnesota Extension.