27/07/2026
I had a very pleasant and logical interaction with the shire council today and I'm genuinely impressed! For context, we have our home kitchen registered as a class C premises so that we can bottle honey. Honey isn't a very high risk food so it isn't anywhere near as intense as a commercial kitchen registration. The inital application and documentation was intense (we had to overhaul the filtering system on our water tanks) but now we just need to have an annual inspection to maintain the registration.
Funnily enough, I don't object to this. I think that we are overregulated in a lot of areas but when it comes to food, I absolutely agree that it should be inspected to make sure that nothing shifty is going on.
So the council contacted me today to say that we are due for the annual inspection and to make a time. The only thing is... it's winter... so we have nothing to extract and probably wont until the end of spring. I let them know this and said that if they inspect at the moment, all they'll see is the kitchen, not the honey process and equipment. Here's the thing... I actually want their feedback on how we do it. We are going to outgrow the kitchen space this year or next year and I'm a bit worried about it. I think we'll either need to renovate one of the external sheds into a full extraction shed or commercial kitchen; or drop down a purpose-built modular building or container/s. As it will be a fair investment, we don't want to do it until we have to. The more advice we can get from someone who sees lots of places, the better!
To their credit, the person agreed that there was little value in only inspecting the kitchen and didnt want to make work for us in setting it all up without honey to extract. They're going to reach out in October/November instead. It was a refreshingly logical interaction and outcome!
