Danielle Mickelson: Suing to Sell Soup

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Head to walmart.com today and score the 4K TV you've been waiting for. And we return to our American stories and now it's time for another Rule of Law story as a part of our Rule of Law series where we show you the absence or presence of the rule of law in our lives. Here's our own Monty Montgomery with a story. Danielle Michaelson's story begins in Rolla, North Dakota. So I'm a North Dakota native. I grew up about 30 miles from where I currently live. I married my high school sweetheart.

I went to the University of North Dakota to be a high school English teacher, which I immediately started doing when I graduated in 1994. So I was an English teacher for 22 years, but the entire time that I was doing that and raising my kids, I was always gardening. It was in my blood. My grandmother was a gardener. My mom and dad were gardeners.

It just seemed like the thing people did. You know, you had to have a garden. You had to produce your own food.

You had to save it for the winter. You had to can and process and then, of course, cook homemade meals. So we were always food producers, but food producers just for our family. In 2014, I was still teaching and still gardening, and my sons, who were then 14 and 12, wanted to make a little money to go visit their grandparents who live in Las Vegas in the wintertime. And I told them they could sell all of our extra vegetables at our farmer's market.

We set up a card table and the bowls from my kitchen, and they sold green beans and potatoes and some onions, and they made $72, and they were beyond excited at how great they were at it. And over the course of the next few years, we grew, our tables grew, our tents grew. We started canning everything from pickles to sulfas to jams and jellies, and it became an intense passion. This growth of this business became a passion, and all of a sudden I realized that my heart needed to be in that garden and not in a classroom anymore. And that was the year that I decided that was the last time that I would leave my garden at the end of August, that the next August I would be there with it, and I would no longer be in the classroom. I quit teaching.

My world and my passion had changed, and I needed to chase it. And Danielle would name her business Michelson Tiny Plants. But why? So our business is called Michelson Tiny Plants because when our kids were really little, they were tiny, tiny humans. I mean, even as they grew, they were still little, little people. And we always referred to them as tiny pants.

Come here, tiny pants. And I feel like it every time that when I start my tiny plants growing in the spring, it's like growing your children. There's this attachment to this life that's coming out of the ground, and it's ground that belongs to me and is nurtured by me. And I watched them, I watched the plants grow, and I watched them produce food. And I remember one of the years, first years I was teaching, I'd been reading an article about food security and how people often don't have food security in their life. And I was standing in the middle of my garden, and I realized that I was, it was my food security, and I could help make it food security for my community.

Which is important to Rala. She's providing a service nobody else does in her city and giving people options such as healthy food. North Dakota is a very long distance from where the majority of fruits and vegetables are grown that end up in our grocery store. The average time from when a vegetable is picked till it gets to Rala, North Dakota, is between 10 and 14 days. And if you take a look at the science of food, the minute you pick a fresh vegetable, it starts to lose nutrients. And I started thinking about, you know, that loss of nutrients by the time it gets to the grocery store, and how I could provide to our community food that had been picked literally the day before. You know, we also have a practice that we believe in no waste, and we just decided to start using our, what we were growing, in products that had a little bit longer shelf life. So some of the overage goes into jars. And we just started putting a few out on the on the table with our vegetables and realized that we had a following.

People were coming back and asking for more. We made 1950 jars last year of dill pickles. And from there we started looking at what you couldn't get in Rala, North Dakota. Like, what can't you get in Rala, North Dakota? One thing was sourdough bread. There's no way to get fresh sourdough bread.

We don't even have a bakery in Rala. We do tomato juice, we do a spicy tomato juice, and so we use our peppers and our onions and our jalapenos and our onions and our jalapenos and our tomatoes, and we make a cold press juice that we can. And then one day the Food Freedom Bill was passed that allowed us to start processing food into other things. Otherwise known as House Bill 1433, the Cottage Food Act was passed by elected officials in the North Dakota House and Senate and opened the door for Danielle's business to expand even more. You see, before the bill passed, things like pizza and French onion soup could only be sold out of somewhere with a commercial kitchen. But now Danielle and others could sell out of their home kitchens directly to their customers.

People have been doing this forever, right? You bake muffins and take them over to your neighbor and and give them to them and they enjoy them. Then your neighbor says, can you make me four dozen?

I want them for my family. And you couldn't at that point sell them to them. You could give them to them, but you couldn't sell them, which seems kind of strange to me. So the cottage food law actually freed that up. As long as the transaction is person to person, as long as the producer of the food is handing the food to the consumer and the consumer can ask the questions and take a look at the product and decide if they trust you. And inherently, that's what these small businesses are about, right?

Friendships and trust. Then you can sell to them. And it really made a huge difference for people who wanted to try starting a small business. You know, biting the bullet and putting in one hundred thousand dollar commercial kitchen because you think you might be good at something is a little scary. But you could actually do a test market. You know, you could you can have your own test market now.

You can try selling things. How did I know that so many people were going to love my dill pickles like my family loves them? But does that mean that everyone who tries them actually will come back to buy more? We didn't know. And so as our business grew, that was a big deal. What the cottage food law allowed was for people to start to expand. And for us, that's exactly what it meant. Our business grew.

I think it was, you know, it was this. So I quit teaching in June 2017 and the cottage food law passed in August 2017. So it was just this immense excitement that when I had trans, you know, when I quit teaching to become a small food producer, this was like another door opened in front of me again. And I could just envision where my business could go. It was just a it was a reinforcing my decision to be a small food producer and a businesswoman. And it was it was, you know, like the stars aligned.

Right. I quit teaching. I put all my energy into this and then this magical door opened and I could use all my creativity and all my planning and thoughts to grow my business literally straightforward. At least that's what Danielle thought would happen with the new law in place.

She didn't expect the face of lawlessness from her own government. And you're listening to Danielle Michelson tell the story of her own freedom to pursue her passion. It turned out that passion was in the garden.

When we come back, more of this story from Rolla, North Dakota, Danielle Michelson story, a freedom story and a rule of law story here on our American story. Who doesn't love the good things in life? Even though I enjoy a little luxury, it doesn't mean I can always afford it until I discovered Quince. Quince is my go to for luxury essentials at affordable prices. Quince offers a range of high quality items at prices within reach, like 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters from $50 washable silk tops and dresses, organic cotton sweaters and 14 karat gold jewelry.

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Happy streaming. And we continue with our American stories and the story of Danielle Michaelson. When we last left off, Danielle was growing her business and was lent a massive helping hand by the passage of the cottage food laws.

But the smooth sailing wouldn't last much longer. Let's continue with her story. Everything seemed to be going well for Danielle Michaelson, but the North Dakota Department of Health and other ideas and tried to get rid of the cottage food laws, which allowed Danielle to sell food she otherwise couldn't. I mean, it was a whirlwind of craziness, right?

We weren't even sure how this could possibly be happening. But the health department decided that they were worried about the safety of these foods, even though there was no foodborne illness in farmers market produced cottage foods produced foods since the passing of the law. And they tried to have the law changed, and they failed. They failed because the North Dakota legislature refused to make the changes to the law that the health department wanted. But after this, the health department did it anyways, which is a violation of the rule of law because administrative bodies can't pass laws on their own.

They can only carry out laws that the legislature passed. I suddenly had to stop selling my soup. I suddenly had to put all of my ideas on hold. And I was I was just shocked.

I was shocked that this is where we had gotten because like I said, I was elated with what could come. And then it was just stopped dead over this fear for food safety. And I'm not faulting them for that. But the one thing I stressed over and over again is when you buy a jar of salsa from me or you buy a quart of soup from me, I actually take what I feed my family from the exact same supply. And I am going to be above and beyond careful about what I am providing to people for sale, because that's the exact same food that I'm feeding my family. And that's how a cottage food producers feel. Also, in a business model, the reality is is you make one person sick and your business is done. So small business can't ride out an E. coli outbreak on Romaine like we've seen across the nation.

Small business has to be on top of their game and specific in particular and perfect at all times. That's why we were surprised when these rules came out because we felt like we were we were the best of the best, right? And suddenly we're the ones that are suffering under the administrative rules. It almost makes you feel like you're not intelligent enough to know better. That's offensive, right?

I'm good at this. And my customers were just heartbroken that they couldn't get the soup that they had learned to depend on. And they're so funny because all of the people that live in my community are they all have the ability to cook and cook well. But French onion soup takes a very long time to caramelize all those onions. And they always like to say, you know, I could make this myself, but I'd much rather you did it because yours is so good and I don't have to, you know, do all the work. And they come to market and they want to buy soup.

And I have to say, I'm sorry, but the health department made rules and I can't sell you soup anymore. And then the crazy part is, is if you're if you are, you know, an English teacher from a town of 1400, you don't even know what you can do to fight it. I had no clue. I didn't have the resources to hire an attorney to fight.

I wasn't even sure what the fight would be. And for the most part, you know, we're just rule following law abiding, happy people. And we don't get put in places where we're suddenly fighting against administrative rules. I'd never even heard that term before. I'll probably when I was in high school, I heard that term before, but I'd never thought about it since high school. And so I didn't even know what to do. And that's why I said that, you know, my business segmented in my and my hopes and dreams sort of died for a second. I just buckled down and went back to work. You know, I guess we'll just sell fresh fruits and vegetables and the things that we can bake and, and can and we'll give up soup. And that's just how it will go. You just sort of resign yourself.

And I think that's a terrible thing to say about what happened to me. Thankfully, she would be approached by the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that stands up for Americans when their rights are violated at no cost to people like Danielle. So thankful for the Institute for Justice, because I didn't even know we could fight it. And suddenly they showed up, you know, like they're your knight in shining armor. And they're like, we can help you. And I'm like, you're got to be kidding me.

And they're like, no, we can help you. You just have to be willing to stand up and be, you know, the plaintiff in the case. And here we go. They, you know, they explained to me that it was unconstitutional.

And I hadn't even thought of it on that level. What they did unilaterally with the, with the administrative rules was circumvent what the entire House and Senate had, you know, they had spoken. We're not changing the law. They circumvented that entire process when they had already voted it down.

There was also a second violation of the rule of law. The North Dakota constitution states that people have to be treated equally under the law. But the rules created by the health department didn't do that. You see, the regulations allow a farmer to sell uninspected raw poultry while banning a home cook like Danielle from selling chicken noodle soup. That makes no sense.

It's completely arbitrary. And thankfully the court saw it that way too, and ruled in Danielle's favor. They, they won. And we just got this email that said, you won your case. And that was it. It was over. And all of a sudden my brain just spun thinking about all of the ways that this had opened this door for me again. And it was time to not worry about being stopped and just barrel forward. And we have new goals now.

And the goals are super funny or super interesting or super ironic, however you want to see it. But our next goal is to build a large scale indoor market that will actually have a commercial kitchen and commercial kitchens will allow us to ship. And so even though my fight was for cottage food, which means I can cook it in my kitchen, my long-term goal gets me a commercial kitchen.

And then I'm, you know, on the other side, you know, then I've crossed over. But the reality is without the cottage food ability, I would have never been able to build my teeny tiny business that started in 2014 to a place where I'm ready to build a facility and have a commercial kitchen. So maybe in one more year, we will be looking at building a new facility right on our main street.

Now watch me now. This business is going to grow like crazy. And great job as always to Monty Montgomery and a special thanks to the folks at the Institute for Justice, who represented Danielle Michelson and represented her freedom to sell food on an equal playing field. And also for the people of North Dakota, it allowed them to get this kind of food and not have it blocked by people who weren't represented in their state legislature. These rules were passed and promulgated by people at the Department of Health.

And the Department of Health doesn't have the right in North Dakota to do such things. What was fascinating was listening to Danielle's sheer frustration. She said, I didn't know what to do. I didn't even know what the fight was or who it was with and what she could do about it. And in came the Institute for Justice and well did what they do, which is represent mostly small businesses in rule of law and property right cases.

The story of Danielle Michelson, the story of Michelson tiny plants, and about so much more, but particularly the rule of law here on Our American Stories. Allstate wants to remind fans that mayhem is everywhere, like when the tailgate party shows up at your house after the big win. Everything's great until the hot plate gets too hot for the tablecloth.

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