The tamales are still warm, the mangoes are still fresh, and the vendors who’ve been feeding the Mission District for years are still showing up — but after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a sweeping new street food ordinance on March 24, the question on every vendor’s mind is: for how long? The law now heads to a second and final reading on April 7, after which Mayor Daniel Lurie will have ten days to sign it into law.
At the heart of the controversy is a new regulatory category — the “Compact Mobile Food Operation,” or CMFO — created to bring San Francisco’s local codes into alignment with California’s SB 972, a 2022 state law signed by Governor Newsom that decriminalized street food vending statewide and took effect January 1, 2023, as reported by Mission Local. The state law required cities to draft their own permitting frameworks in response — and San Francisco’s version, three years in the making, is now drawing fierce opposition from the very vendors it was ostensibly designed to legalize.
The Price of Compliance
The new ordinance requires street vendors selling fresh, hot, or unpackaged food to operate from compliant carts — not tables — equipped with handwashing stations and refrigeration. Those carts can run anywhere from $8,000 to $18,000, according to ABC7 and El Tecolote. For vendors netting roughly $2,000 a month, that’s not a compliance cost — it’s a business-ending one.
On top of the equipment burden, vendors are no longer permitted to prepare food at home. Instead, they must rent time at licensed commissary kitchens, which, as Nuestra Causa director Leila Ovando noted to ABC7, run $30 to $100 an hour. If a vendor is already clearing just $2,000 a month in profit, commissary kitchen fees alone could consume a substantial chunk of that income. “That eats substantial cost for folks,” Ovando said. The nonprofit Nuestra Causa represents approximately 75 food vendors in the Mission District…