PORTLAND, Maine — In a tiny urban apartment, dark and stormy bonbons are made in small batches. In a sparkly new home by the sea, a woman plunges up to her elbows in colorful meringues. Over in Damariscotta, bars of goat milk soap cool in a basement root cellar.
What do these diverse businesses have in common? They are all home-based.
Yankee ingenuity takes many forms. As Maine’s robust DIY economy soars, homeowners are supplementing their income with ideas incubated, executed, packaged and shipped all from around the kitchen sink.
“Home-based businesses are on the rise in Maine, especially in the cultural [and] food sector,” Jim McConnon, a professor of economics at the University of Maine, said. He estimates that 69,000 businesses, mostly single proprietor, are home-based. That equates to just over 5 percent of the state’s population.
“In Maine there is no stigma for staying at home and working in your pajama pants,” Amanda Nelson, CEO and head soapmaker at Long Winter Soap Co., said. The company that started in a yurt in 2007 is now headquartered in the basement of her 1931 house in Damariscotta. In root cellars and throughout the house, Nelson and her partner Lucas McNelly and two children balance life, success and work.
In the run-up to the holidays, soaps and perfumes in scents like barista and absinthe cover every surface.
“There is no separation. I have piles of stuff in closets. There are worse things that could take over your house,” said Nelson, who sells her handcrafted products in shops up and down the coast and worldwide online.
Lurking behind closed doors, in houses of all descriptions — big, small, new, old — your neighbors are busy.
The state’s food revolution that’s going full throttle also is propelling a whole range of domestic businesses.
“It’s an easy process,” Beth Calder, a food science specialist at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, said about the rules for launching an edible cottage business. Depending on the product (low-risk, non-hazardous food that isn’t canned or refrigerated) an inspection from the state’s Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry is the chief hurdle.
The state receives a “steady flow” of applications for food-based home businesses year after year. With no signs of stopping, “we anticipate even more interest,” department spokesperson John Bott said, adding that dairy and artisan cheese makers lead the pack.
When full-time mom Anne Taylor decided to take her gourmet macarons to market, she didn’t look for a commercial facility. The bright kitchen in her passive solar home was the perfect launch pad for Morsels by Anne.
“For me it’s very Maine,” she said of her meringue-filled cookies made with egg whites from her heritage chickens and augmented with herbs and fruit growing outside her door. “It’s about food and flavors and community. Keeping it local, keeping it simple, keeping it organic.”
In business for only a few months, how does the solopreneur keep life balanced?
“I grind flour when the kids are in school,” said Taylor, who transforms her kitchen island into a baker’s workshop after her two girls head off for the day. “I try and work it so that the kitchen is not overrun with my stuff.”
To stay on top of housework and make sure the macarons behave, Taylor carries a timer as she runs around to fold clothes and pay bills.
When her girls come home they find their mother ankle deep in flour. They pitch in, taste test, and her eldest daughter is even helping with her next brainwave: an ice cream company. Her only rule: “When I am folding the eggs you can’t bother me.”
She doesn’t try to hide her entrepreneurial discipline, just the contrary.
“Our children learn by imitation. They come to you as a blank slate. How you carry yourself as a parent is very important,” Taylor said. “I was not prepared for the world, but I figured it out. I want my daughters to get a head start, finding a balance between being creative and able to support themselves.”
In downtown Portland’s Dartmouth Street, the seductive aroma of chocolate wafts from the headquarters of Christopher Hastings Confections. The year-old small-batch company is gearing up for a retail space, but for now the compact home kitchen of founders Nate Towne and Mark Simpson serves perfectly.
Fine tuning their popular Maine sea salt caramels, sold at pop-up shops and a few locations in Portland, and testing the market is more affordable from their domestic hearth. Supplies are kept in bins, equipment is stashed on stainless steel wire racks, a three-season porch is the packaging and boxing area.
“You have to have constant organization of the kitchen or it overtakes your life,” said Simpson, the head chocolate maker, who is turning out a few hundred bonbons a week in a 10-foot-by-8-foot room.
When it’s time for dinner, the chocolate shop disappears and, presto chango, the kitchen returns.
“You’ve heard of tiny house living?” Towne said. “This is tiny kitchen living.”
