To wonder whether it’s legal for children to knock on doors seeking cookies?

[W0tever]

Is it? I’m genuinely unsure.

I know in the US there’s a culture of children running neighborhood lemonade stands from their front gardens plus the well-known scheme where Girl Scouts sell their cookies. Yet in the UK do you not need a licence to sell anything edible and to prove you’ve met certain hygiene standards?

We had a couple of 9-10 year-olds come to the door this evening wanting to sell some cookies they were carrying in a bag for life. I assume homemade although I didn’t actually get a proper look at them. I said honestly that I didn’t have any cash in the house so would have to pass on this occasion. Something made me feel a bit uncomfortable about the whole thing though. I assume their parents are on board. Although perhaps not.

Has anyone else encountered anything like this?

Don’t go to a school fair OP. There are homemade treats and children with sticky unwashed hands everywhere!

I remember those. They came round once a week. I think my Mum probably like most of their customers felt quilted into buying

I’m funny with eating from others I would buy them so the little one gets some cash and give the foxes a little treat everyone wins

What about local village or church fetes and coffee mornings and as PP mentioned school fairs? The cake stalls are often the most popular and no one has inspected the homes of all the people who have donated cakes .

For things like a one off / occasional event selling ‘low risk’ items - like a cake stand at a school fete, fundraiser etc you typically don’t need to register as a food business so something like this would likely be ok. (Doesn’t mean I’d buy homemade food from kids I don’t know though, or at least I likely wouldn’t eat it!)

Definitely I have youngsters on the street who regularly do a lemonade stand.
Adult neighbors who sell on our local FB page East Indian Samosas and another who sells Lumpia.
DH and I sell honey.
I try to buy from kids or at least donate my spare change.
i’m obscessed with the girl guide mint meltsways…I buy those boxes 6 at a time.

Do you rush off reporting school cake fairs to environmental health? How is that different?

There are a lot of exceptions to those food business regulations, OP. They allow for cake stalls, fundraisers, hobbyists doing a market stall once a month, that sort of thing.

It's perfectly legal to sell cookies or cakes like that

It's very sad that we even have to think about this. It reminds me of 2020, when parents said to their children "no, you can't go to your cousin's house to play, it's against the law, Boris said so." Perhaps people still have lockdown on their minds, where everyday things which children have done since time immemorial literally became illegal overnight, for months on end.

Having said that, I remember that as a child, I once saw a box of apples outside someone's house with a sign saying "take one", and I thought "what if they are poisoned, like in Snow White?". And I also thought of Alice's cake which said "eat me", and made her grow nine feet high.

The kids and I have eaten home made cakes and biscuits from cake stands at the school fair and from kids parties for many years and no one has ever been ill. There are some foods I’d be more wary of, but cakes and biscuits seem a pretty safe bet. I think a home baker is often more likely to be strict about food hygiene when making a one off batch of cakes, than some cafes that sure- are meant to follow the rules- but not all do. For me anything that gets kids doing something other than sitting indoors watching screens gets my vote!

If it was an adult making hundreds of £’s then thats a problem. A couple of 10 year olds trying to save for a toy and making some fudge (no doubt with the help from Mum) then nahhh. No one’s going to be arsed about a license/certificate for that.

I love chatting to the kids.

If they are selling to raise money for a charity then they are legal. Ìf its for themselves then technically they could be considered a business which should be registered with the local authority but there is some discretion for infrequent occasions and I think some schoolchildren selling in the holidays would fall into this category. food at community and charity events | Food Standards Agency share.google/D4g2cULsKztBjGu05 Providing food at community and charity events | Food Standards Agency share.google/D4g2cULsKztBjGu05

Yes it was always kids! I don’t think I have had a macaroon bar since.

Okay, I'm a bit of a grouch on the selling/Halloween knocks on strangers doors.

1. There are many times older children harass the elderly....or worse.
2. We instill on children safety rules and don't talk to strangers then actively encourage them to ask strangers for money or treats.

Nothing bad should happen, but in real life I'm ensuring nothing happens.

Pretty hard for parents not to know if they’re cooking in the kitchen… a hard one to hide.

I've always wondered about that.

And if someone does get ill / has an allergic reaction to something they buy, where does the person who sold it to them stand legally?

I think it’s quite odd that thoughts of the legalities of children going door to door to sell home made biscuits even entered your mind.

I mean, I can completely understand concerns about safety, or not wanting to eat them because they’re children, so obviously won’t be bound by hygiene regulations if they’re making them themselves. But wondering if they’re breaking the law by doing so is a little strange. What difference would it make?

Then they’ll learn a valuable lesson that buying food from children and expecting them to either comply with basic hygiene or provide an accurate account of ingredients is a pretty bloody stupid thing to do.

I would have bought the cookies and I would have eaten them too. Just as I do when I see a stall selling home made cakes at a fete or similar. However, I know there are lots of people on Mumsnet who appear to have a horror of eating anything not baked in their own kitchen.

Not in this day and age though where allergy sufferer's are suing people every 5 minutes. People compare the kids to stalls at fetes etc but you'll see those baked good will have been hygienically transported in clean tubs and there'll likely be a list of allergens and ingredients for everything.
It's a little ropey going around with loose biscuits in a bag for life because those kids could have found packets of biscuits in bins behind a shop and emptied them into there

I agree, to a point, but if someone has a potentially life threatening allergy and they’re accepting the word of two kids going door to door selling biscuits out of a bag for life that there are no nuts etc, then they fully deserve an epi pen in the leg for being such an irresponsible idiot. If they are that stupid, no law is going to keep them alive.

I'd love it if someone knocked on my door with home made cookies 😋

When you say toss, do you mean throw away?

There is no requirement to have any kind of registration with environmental health or food safety certification for one-off charity events. I help an organisation with fundraising and we looked into this. You should list all the ingredients though so that people consuming them can avoid allergens.