How to obtain licenses from the health department and fire department as well as a sales tax license

(Editor’s note: This is the fifth installment in a series about opening a mobile pizzeria by Jason Cipriani, co-owner of Sips & Pies. You can read the other articles here.)

After deciding on a pizza style, oven and finding a truck or trailer to fit your vision, it’s easy to feel like the hard part is behind you. But there’s another major hurdle you’ll need to overcome before you can open: getting licensed.

For us, that meant obtaining a retail food license, passing a fire department inspection and getting a city sales tax license. It sounds easy, but there’s so much that goes into it. Be prepared for frustrations and roadblocks.

Talk With Local Government

Each jurisdiction is different and has varying guidelines and requirements. I strongly encourage you to begin conversations about what it takes to open a mobile pizzeria in your area before you buy your equipment.

More specifically, contact the health department and fire inspector. You want to get to a point where you have an open dialogue with the inspectors that allows you to ask questions – even if you don’t like the answers, which often was the case in our situation.

After one of many back-and-forth phone calls, with me playing messenger between the fire and health departments, trying to get approval for the portable propane ovens I wanted to use, I was told to “just buy a ($60,000) trailer” to ensure it met all requirements – even though it didn’t meet any of the requirements I’d need to convert it into a mobile pizzeria.

Disheartening.

Check the Required Boxes

Once you’ve contacted your local authorities and have a copy of the application – and, hopefully, a checklist of requirements you’ll need to meet before you submit your application – it’s time to get to work.

More than likely, you’ll need to have a Certified Food Protection Manager always on site. I earned my certification through a training and exam provider approved by my local health department. The class and test fees set me back $132 when I purchased it in 2024. Some health departments might offer the test for a smaller fee.

You’ll want to have a signed commissary agreement to prove to the health department that you’re going to use an inspected and approved commercial kitchen (some jurisdictions allow you to use your home as your commissary). I’ll talk more about commissaries in a future column.

Some areas, such as where I’m at in Colorado, require food trucks to go through a review and licensing process similar to what’s required of a brick-and-mortar restaurant. There’s a $100 application fee, a $385 Retail Food License fee once you’ve passed inspection and an $85-per-hour application-review fee.

Some other municipalities only require vendors to get a permit when they have pop-up events, with smaller application fees – a financial benefit if you do a limited number of pop ups per year. I wish this was an option for us – at least until we get into a more consistent schedule.

In addition to health and fire department permits, you’ll also want to figure out if you need any sort of sales tax licenses for the cities and counties where you’ll be operating. I needed a city sales tax license, which required filling out a few forms and $55 to obtain, but I don’t need a county sales tax license.

Another thing to keep in mind is that just because you’re fully licensed in your county doesn’t mean you can set up and do business in the next county. You might need to go through the entire process again for every county where you do business. As with all things licensing, be sure to check local laws and regulations.

Inspection Day: a Happy Let Down

The inspection process for both the health and fire departments means you’ll have to set up your truck or trailer just as you would if you were going to sell to customers – without any food, of course.

Both health and fire department inspectors offered to come to our house to look at our trailer instead of asking us to set up and tear down the trailer and equipment in their respective parking lots for what amounted to a 10-minute inspection process.

Our inspections were split over two days due to scheduling conflicts. We had our fire inspection first. The inspector ensured we had the proper fire extinguishers (a $300 Class K and $50 ABC fire extinguisher were required for our trailer), that our oven had three open air sides (the entire enclosure is open air) and offered general safety advice about handling the propane tank used for our on-demand hot water heater.

The health inspection came days later. I had spent at least 100 hours reading and analyzing all aspects of the health department guidance in preparation for the inspection. I put together a binder full of our food-safety policies, I had my wife quiz me about our safe food-handling procedures, and then I repeated those procedures to her in case the inspector quizzed her.

The lead-up to the inspection felt a lot like studying for a college final that determines whether you will graduate.

And on exam day, the test ended up including a few of the easiest questions you could imagine. In our case, we had to demonstrate we had hot running water for the handwashing station, sanitizer and test strips readily available, show our prep station got cold enough for safe food storage, and have an allergy disclaimer displayed somewhere customers could see it (we put it on our menu).

The entire inspection process took seven minutes. We were told we checked all the required boxes, and all that was left to do was go to the health department, pay our $385 licensing fee and pick up our sticker.

I was ecstatic but also felt a weird sense of disappointment that the inspection wasn’t more rigorous. I realize how foolish that sounds, and I’m grateful we passed without issue. If I hadn’t overprepared, perhaps things wouldn’t have gone so smoothly.

My biggest fear at the time was that we’d fail the first inspection, have a long list of things to fix and then have to wait several weeks for another inspection. I was relieved when the monster I created in my head turned out to be a cuddly teddy bear.

JASON CIPRIANI is the owner of Sips & Pies, a mobile wood-fired pizzeria serving Neapolitan-inspired pizza, in Colorado.