Market: United States
The worst fit of the markets scanned, and the reason is a mismatch between what the obvious exemption covers and what this model actually does.
Cottage food laws do not help
Every state has some form of cottage food regime, and they look like the answer. They are not. Cottage food laws govern food the operator makes at home — baked goods, jams, candies, dry mixes, granola, popcorn, nuts — typically restricted to non-time-temperature-controlled products. The exemption is for home production, not for resale of commercially manufactured packaged goods.
A host buying cases of Coke and boxes of chocolate bars to resell is not a cottage food producer. Nothing was made at home. That places the activity outside the cottage food carve-out and toward retail food establishment permitting.
Retail food establishment permitting is the likely category
That regime is county-level and locally administered, fee-bearing, and usually inspection-based before trading. It varies wildly: some states set a floor and let local boards of health fill in fees, training, plan review and inspection cadence, which produces hundreds of different rule sets within a single state. Massachusetts is the standard illustration — the state code is a floor and local boards do the rest.
Channel restrictions compound the problem
Several states limit home-based food operations to direct sales only. Mail delivery is barred in some, with online ordering plus in-person pickup as the workaround. Others restrict sales to farmers markets, bake sales and charity events, or prohibit selling across state lines. Indirect and wholesale channels are permitted in only a handful of states. A delivery-first model runs straight into these channel rules even where the product category is fine.
Where it might work
The variance cuts both ways. Recent food freedom laws in states such as Wyoming, North Dakota, Utah and Alaska are far more permissive, some with no revenue cap and direct-to-consumer delivery allowed within the state. Those are also, with the exception of parts of Utah, exactly the low-density markets where a neighbourhood snack marketplace has the least chance of hitting the order volume it needs.
Assessment
The United States is not one market, it is thousands. A national launch is not available; a city-by-city legal review is the only honest path, and the permissive states are largely the wrong states demographically. If the model is to be tested outside Australia, the UK is the cheaper second market despite its lead-time friction.