North Dakota Home Kitchen Meals: No MEHKO Permit, but a Licensed Bed and Breakfast May Serve Two Meals a Day

Ask the permit question and the answer in North Dakota is no. There is no microenterprise home kitchen operation licence, no home restaurant permit and no meal-count registration in the Century Code. Ask the exemption question and a real scheme appears.

The starting point is how wide the licensing net is. Section 23-09-01(6) defines a food establishment to include any fixed restaurant, limited restaurant, coffee shop, cafeteria, short-order cafe, luncheonette, grill, tearoom, sandwich shop, soda fountain, tavern, bar, catering kitchen, delicatessen, bakery, grocery store, meat market, food processing plant, school, child care, mobile or temporary food establishment, or similar place in which food or drink is prepared for sale or service to the public on the premises or elsewhere, with or without charge. Section 23-09-16 then says that before any food establishment may be operated in this state it must be licensed by the department, with a waiver only where a city or district health unit licenses it under sanitation rules the department has approved. A home kitchen selling dinners to the public is inside that definition, and section 23-09-21 makes operating without complying with the chapter a class B misdemeanor.

The carve-out is section 23-09-23, one sentence long: this chapter does not apply to bed and breakfast facilities for which rules have been adopted under chapter 23-09.1. Those rules exist, at North Dakota Administrative Code chapter 33-33-06, so the exemption is live rather than contingent.

Chapter 23-09.1 then draws the boundary with two numbers. Section 23-09.1-01(1) defines a bed and breakfast facility as a private home used to provide accommodations for a charge to the public, with not more than seven lodging units, in which no more than two family-style meals per day are provided. Cross the seven-unit line or serve a third meal service and the home is back under chapter 23-09. Section 23-09.1-01(3) defines a family-style meal as a meal ordered by persons staying at the facility which is served from common food service containers, as long as any food not consumed by those persons is not reused or fed to other people if the food is unwrapped. Two consequences follow from that wording. The meal must go to a guest who is staying at the house, so a licensed North Dakota bed and breakfast cannot open its dining room to walk-in customers, and leftovers from a shared serving dish cannot be recycled to the next sitting.

Licensing runs through the Department of Health and Human Services. Section 23-09.1-02.2 requires a licence before any bed and breakfast facility may operate, licences expire on December thirty-first following issuance, renewal applications are made during December of every year, and a licence is not transferable and is good only for the premises for which it was issued. The fee comes from rule rather than statute: N.D.A.C. 33-33-06-18, amended effective January 1, 2026, sets the annual licence fee at sixty dollars, adds a licence application administration fee of one hundred dollars on an initial application, charges a plan review application fee of fifty percent of the annual fee where a plan review is required, and adds fifty percent of the licence fee on a renewal made after February first following expiration. Section 23-09.1-02.1 requires the department to inspect each facility at least once every two years, and lets an authorized officer, employee or agent enter and inspect the property at any reasonable time.

Section 23-09.1-02 also preempts local government in unusually direct terms: no political subdivision, including a home rule city or county, may impose health and safety, licensure or inspection requirements that exceed the requirements of the chapter or the department's rules. A Fargo or Grand Forks ordinance cannot add a home kitchen inspection on top of the state licence.

The operating standards sit in the administrative rules and are closer to a restaurant's than a household's. Under N.D.A.C. 33-33-06-04 food must be obtained from, or be equal to food from, sources complying with all food and food labeling laws, and fluid milk and milk products must be pasteurized and meet grade A quality standards. Under 33-33-06-05 potentially hazardous food must be held at forty-one degrees Fahrenheit or below or one hundred thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit or above except during necessary preparation and serving, an indicating thermometer must be located in each refrigerator, and potentially hazardous frozen food must be thawed at forty-one degrees or below or quick-thawed as part of cooking. The lodging side of 33-33-06-13 requires fifty square feet of floor area per guest in every sleeping unit, an escape or rescue window of at least 5.7 square feet net clear opening with a minimum height of twenty-four inches, a minimum width of twenty inches and a sill no more than forty-four inches above the floor, bars sleeping units in attic lofts and in basement rooms with a single major means of escape, requires a 2A rated extinguisher with a BC rating within seventy-five feet of travel, and requires the owner to test battery-operated smoke detectors weekly and hard-wired detectors monthly with written records of the date and results.

1-05 sets the penalty for the bed and breakfast scheme: any person who willfully violates the chapter or any rule or order of the department must be punished by a civil penalty of not more than three hundred dollars per day of violation. 1-04 gives the department a parallel civil route, an action in the name of the state for a permanent or temporary injunction, a restraining order or an order directing compliance, available where the department judges that a person has engaged in or is about to engage in acts violating the chapter, a rule or an order.

C. 33-33-06-17 requires the department first to give written notice of the violation and a reasonable time to comply, delivered personally or by mail requiring a signed receipt, before it may refuse a new licence or suspend or revoke an existing one through an administrative hearing under chapter 28-32. 1-32-01(6) by up to thirty days' imprisonment and a fine of one thousand five hundred dollars, and section 23-09-19 directs the state's attorney of the county, on the sworn complaint of a department inspector, to prosecute.

Section 23-09-22 lets the department cancel a proprietor's licence where the proprietor has been convicted under the chapter and fails to comply for ten days after the conviction.