While a cottage food career comes with plenty of challenges, Karla McNeil-Rueda has leveraged it as an opportunity to create her own vision of success.

Stephanie Stiavetti had an IT job that she liked in Sacramento, managing a company’s servers, mobile devices and computers. Yet her real passion was cooking. She had attended culinary school, designed recipes, dabbled in freelance food writing and had even written a cookbook.

I’m a corporate recruiter. For candidates that progress to an HR phone screen, we ask their expected salary and share the range we have for the role. Is it appropriate to use someone’s low salary expectations as a reason for not moving forward? I’m concerned that a candidate who makes so much less won’t be a good fit. Is that the case?

The California Military Department headquarters in Rancho Cordova is one of the first large-scale efforts attempting to meet a California mandate regarding the energy efficiency of state facilities.

We asked readers to submit their picks for the Capital Region’s top entrepreneurs —and you answered. Our editorial team vetted almost 100 nominations, looking for innovative business ideas, interesting backstories, unique products and services and that ineffable “it” factor. And here they are…

With interest in MBAs flat or falling across the nation, can modernization help programs keep up with student interest? We take a look at how the region’s education programs are innovating their offerings.

Resilience and risk are must-have traits to secure support for your entrepreneurial vision.

Alexander Suelto has always been inspired by street art. As a teenager coming of age in Stockton in the ‘90s, he admired the local graffiti artists whose art brought the city to life. Back then, street art was widely stigmatized.

One in five adults in this country will experience a diagnosable mental illness during their lifetime. Here, in Sacramento County, an estimated 300,000 residents are living with mental illness, which impacts every ethnic, racial, cultural, economic, religious, gender, sexual orientation and age group.

With the deployment of Verizon’s 5G wireless network on the horizon in 2018, some say Sacramento has the potential to become a lightning rod for tech. Is there truth to the hype?

As the food court at a Sacramento mall buzzed with families on a recent summer day, Emily Wickelgren and her daughter Thea were enjoying lunch at Subway. The 7-year-old opted for water with her sandwich instead of soda or juice.

Getting reliable information about cannabis may be more important than ever. But finding reliable cannabis information has become harder because of another trend — the decimation of newsroom staffs.

Outside, the new Cowo Campus is a not-so-obvious coworking space. It takes up the second floor of a bureaucratic-looking building also home to the DMV’s New Motor Vehicle Board. But inside, Cowo Campus resembles a trendy and modern workspace, with sleek offices and furniture, contemporary art and artisan coffee, among other amenities.

For advocates looking to curb disposable plastic use and pollution through regulation, California represents the benchmark. But for industry groups, the regulation is overly burdensome, going too far to restrict what businesses can do, which they argue would ultimately increase costs for consumer goods.

Origin Materials is part of a small but growing bioplastics market. Regulation, recycling and changing consumer behavior have proven ineffective in curbing the environment impacts of plastic. With plastic production projected to double over the next 20 years, Origins founders think the key solution lies in the bottles themselves. 

Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, offers his insight into the plastics industry.

Anne Bown-Crawford, executive director of the California Arts Council on the arts as an economic driver. 

Amanda Blackwood took charge of the Sacramento Metro Chamber on May 1, and immediately embarked on a 100-day plan to assess and redefine strategy.

California’s public universities will get an infusion of cash to increase enrollment, smooth students’ progress toward graduation and repair aging buildings under a state budget agreement reached Friday by Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders.

The Stanley Mosk Library and Courts building in downtown Sacramento was in dire need of a rehabilitative makeover to bring back its historic beauty.