Starting a food business in Langford

Business licence

All businesses operating in Langford need a business licence. A resident licence is perpetual — no renewal unless the business closes, changes owner or moves — while a non-resident licence must be renewed each year.

Fee: “Home Occupation or Home Office Fee: $100” (current application form) — paid once, since a resident licence doesn’t expire

Running it from home

Catering only. Langford lists the home businesses it allows — “the following uses and no others” — and the one food use is catering (food for delivery and consumption off-site) in a one-family dwelling, with Medical Health Officer approval before it operates. Making packaged food to sell, such as baking or preserves, is “food and beverage processing and packaging”, which the bylaw names as light industry and bans as a home occupation. On lots of 4,000 m² or more, “small scale manufacturing” is allowed as a home industry, which may conflict with that ban — ask Planning.

• Catering must be contained within a one-family dwelling (ss. 3.09.01(5), 3.09.03(1)(c)).
• A home business (lots under 4,000 m²): at most 25% of the dwelling and 65 m² (699.7 ft²) on any lot (ss. 3.09.01(6), 3.09.03(2)).
• No restaurant, no manufacturing or other light industrial use, and no retail or wholesale sale of goods except those made as part of the home occupation (s. 3.09.01(3)).
• A food services establishment under the Food Premises Regulation needs Medical Health Officer approval before operating (s. 3.09.01(11)).
• A City of Langford business licence (s. 3.09.01(9)).
• No more than one employee who does not live there (s. 3.09.01(12)).
• No more parking demand than two visitors an hour 9:00 am–6:00 pm Monday to Friday and one an hour at other times (s. 3.09.01(2)(e)).
• No noise, vibration, smoke, dust, odour, litter or heat beyond what a dwelling normally produces (s. 3.09.01(2)(b)).
• No storage outside a permitted building; one unlit sign of up to 0.2 m² (s. 3.09.01(7)–(8)).
• A home office (allowed in any dwelling, apartments included) may not serve customers on the lot (s. 3.09.02(a)).

Markets and events

Vendors should expect to need a Langford licence: the bylaw’s “peddler” is anyone setting up a temporary business to sell goods, and peddlers must display a valid business licence; selling on City land also needs Council permission. Food trucks at The Langford Station, the City-run food truck site, need their own Langford licence regardless of licences from other jurisdictions: a one-time $100 fee plus a Langford Fire Department inspection.

Mobile businesses

Langford residents can buy an Inter-municipal licence that lets a mobile business — the form names painting, plumbing and catering — operate in all 13 Greater Victoria municipalities; it must come from the municipality where the business is located. Langford is not in the Vancouver Island Inter-Community partnership the Province lists.

Fee: The current form lists it as an add-on with no separate fee; the 2016 bylaw schedule says "Inter-municipal $100.00"