How the Tamale Act changed: a food freedom bill that picked up a cap and a registration mandate

DENVER — A bill that began as a straightforward expansion of Colorado’s home-kitchen food rules ended the 2026 session as something its earliest champion went to the Capitol to oppose. On the May 15 broadcast of The Kim Monson Show, with guest host Marshall Dawson, Free State Colorado founder Brandon Wark walked through how HB26-1033, the “Tamale Act,” moved from a bill he made a video celebrating to one he spoke against in the final days of the legislature.

The shift is a case study in how a measure can change shape between introduction and enactment. Colorado’s cottage food law currently caps home-kitchen sales at $10,000 a year. The bill as introduced would have removed that ceiling entirely. The version that passed instead sets the cap at $150,000 and adds an annual state registration requirement that the introduced bill did not contain.

What the bill set out to do

The Colorado Cottage Foods Act, enacted in 2012, lets home producers sell items like dry spices, teas, honey, jellies, baked goods, tortillas and coffee beans, according to Colorado Newsline. Those are nonperishable foods that do not require refrigeration for safety. The same law imposes a $10,000 annual revenue cap and bars producers from selling to retail or grocery stores.

HB26-1033, formally titled the “Tamale Act,” set out to broaden that framework. As introduced in January 2026, the bill repealed the revenue cap outright. Its own summary stated plainly that “the bill removes the $10,000 cap on net revenues that a producer can earn under the CCFA.” For a home cook, that meant no ceiling on cottage food sales at all.

That is the version Wark backed. “House Bill 1033, the Tamale Act, started out as a great food freedom bill,” he said on The Kim Monson Show. “Originally, the bill was great. I did a video on it, posting about it, really celebrating it, encouraging people to show up and testify in support of it.”

What the enacted bill actually does

The bill that cleared the Capitol does not repeal the revenue cap. It rewrites it. The enacted Final Act amends the cap provision so that it applies to producers who “earn … gross revenues of … one hundred fifty thousand dollars or less per calendar year,” with the department directed to adjust that figure annually for inflation. Measured against current law, that is a large increase, from $10,000 to $150,000. Measured against the bill as introduced, which had no cap at all, it is a ceiling that was put back in.

The enacted bill also adds an anti-circumvention clause that did not exist before: “A producer shall not establish, reorganize, or operate multiple entities or contractual arrangements for the purpose of circumventing this revenue cap.”

The second major change is registration. The introduced bill contained no mandatory registration; earlier drafts described a registry as voluntary. The enacted bill adds a new requirement: “A producer shall annually register with the department before selling any food under this section,” and “the department shall issue a registration number to each producer.” It converts the registry from one an agency “may create” on a voluntary basis to one the department “shall create and maintain,” shared with local health agencies and posted on the department’s public-facing website, and requires the producer’s department-issued registration number to appear on every product label.

Both of the specific changes Wark named on air are in the enacted text: a tighter cap relative to the bill he supported, and a new registration requirement. The prime House sponsor, Rep. Ryan Gonzalez, a Greeley Republican, had signaled the possibility months earlier, telling Colorado Newsline in February that the cap removal “might be negotiated back in.”

How a champion became a critic

For Wark, the distance between the introduced bill and the enacted one was the whole story. “And this bill is an example of how things can change so quickly at the state capitol,” he said. “But then the Democrat majority got their hands on it. And they used this bill as an opportunity to actually increase government control over the cottage food industry, instituting a stricter revenue cap, creating registration requirements.”

He told the show he reversed his position as the bill neared passage. “And ultimately, I ended up opposing the bill and spoke against it just this last week here during the last couple days of the session during the committee hearing because this bill has been changed so much,” he said. “The intentions, I think, originally were good to expand our food freedom around the Cottage Food Act in Colorado. But unfortunately, as it so often happens, things change. And all of a sudden, an amendment to a bill can make it into something totally different.”

The bill itself carried bipartisan sponsorship. Gonzalez, the prime House sponsor, is a Republican; the measure drew co-sponsors and Senate sponsors from both parties. The amendments that reshaped it moved through the Democrat-controlled legislature. The substantive flip, the $150,000 cap and the mandatory registration, was already present in the reengrossed version of April 30, even though that version’s bill summary still said the bill “removes the $10,000 cap.” The enacted text, not the summary, is the authoritative description of what passed.

What survived and what did not

Not every restriction added in the House survived. As the bill moved through the chamber, additional provisions were added, including language allowing random inspections of home kitchens by health departments, according to CBS Colorado. A free-market group, the Libre Initiative, raised Fourth Amendment concerns over those inspection provisions. The Senate later walked back the random-home-inspection language.

The two changes Wark specifically cited did not get walked back. The $150,000 gross cap, the inflation indexing, the anti-circumvention clause and the mandatory annual registration with a department-issued number all carried through into the enacted Final Act, with the cap and registration provisions effective January 1, 2027.

For producers, the practical picture is twofold. A home cook who today cannot exceed $10,000 in cottage food sales will, under the new law, be able to sell up to $150,000, a substantial expansion. At the same time, that producer will have to register with the state every year, carry a state-issued registration number, and print it on every label, a tracking-and-registration regime the bill as introduced did not have. Wark’s objection is to the second half of that picture, and to the trade that produced it.