Alaska cottage food label requirements

Alaska rewrote this law in 2024. House Bill 251, enacted as Chapter 34 SLA 2024, replaced the old cottage food exemption with a "homemade food" exemption that drops the $25,000 cap, allows refrigerated foods if you sell them yourself, and lets grocery stores carry shelf-stable items. The Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) then repealed the old rule, 18 AAC 31.012(a), effective May 11, 2025. If a guide still shows a $25,000 limit or a "THESE PRODUCTS ARE NOT SUBJECT TO STATE INSPECTION" label, it is describing a rule that no longer exists.

There are five situations where the answer flips and you do need a panel. They're below, after the part you actually came for.

The label Alaska actually requires

AS 17.20.332(e) says a homemade food "packaged for individual sale must be clearly and prominently labeled with" the following. Every packaged homemade food product you sell in Alaska needs:

1. The producer's name.
2. The producer's current address. The statute says "current address" and offers no ID-number substitute.
3. The producer's telephone number.
4. The producer's business license number, if applicable. Alaska requires a state business license for most businesses; if you hold one, the number goes on the label.
5. The Alaska disclaimer, word for word.

That is the whole statutory list. Notice what is not on it. Alaska's statute exempts homemade food from "state labeling" requirements, so it does not demand an ingredient list, a net weight, or a species-by-species allergen declaration. The disclaimer's "may contain allergens" is the only allergen language the state requires.

We'd still put an ingredient list and a "Contains" statement on every package, for three reasons. A grocery buyer will ask for them. A customer with a peanut allergy deserves them. And both are mandatory under 21 CFR 101.4 and 21 U.S.C. 343(w) the day you leave the exemption. Federal law covers nine allergens: milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame. Sesame joined the list under the FASTER Act on January 1, 2023. Declare them parenthetically inside the ingredient list or in a separate "Contains" statement, and name tree nuts, fish, and shellfish by species — "almonds," not "tree nuts."

The exact disclaimer wording

This food was made in a home kitchen, is not regulated or inspected, except for meat and meat products, and may contain allergens.

That is AS 17.20.332(e)(2), one sentence, sentence case, including the odd-looking meat clause. The statute sets no minimum type size; "clearly and prominently" is the standard.

Don't paraphrase it, don't cut the meat clause because you sell cookies, and don't substitute the old regulation's all-caps wording. The statute is the source now, and the sentence is what buyers and market managers will look for.

Two situations change the format. For unpackaged food, AS 17.20.332(g) requires you to tell the buyer before the sale that the food was prepared under the homemade food exemption and is not subject to state certification, labeling, licensing, packaging, regulation, or inspection, and to give them your name, address, phone number, and business license number. For food sold from a retail space, 17.20.332(d) requires a prominent sign saying the food was made in a home kitchen, may contain allergens, and is not regulated or inspected, and homemade food may not share a shelf or display with inspected food.

Where a Nutrition Facts panel becomes required

No US state requires a full Nutrition Facts panel on cottage food products. You need one when:

1. You make a nutrient content claim — "high protein," "low sugar," "keto," "sugar free." Any of these obligates the panel that substantiates it.
2. You make a health claim — connecting your food to a disease or health condition.
3. You outgrow your state's cottage food cap and move to a commercial kitchen. At that point you are a regular food manufacturer and the cottage exemption is gone.
4. You sell wholesale or into retail. Cottage exemptions are almost universally direct-to-consumer only.
5. You sell on Amazon or another marketplace that requires a panel. Amazon's requirement is contractual, not legal, and it does not care what your state says.

Alaska has no cap, so trigger three never arrives on its own, and trigger four is softened because the statute lets a third-party retailer sell your non-hazardous homemade food. The practical trigger here is the retailer's own standards: a grocery chain shelving your granola will usually want a panel whether or not AS 17.20.332 does. The other one is trigger one, and the "high protein" jerky maker is the classic case.

Trigger one catches more people than the other four combined, and it catches them somewhere they don't expect. Under 21 CFR 101.9(j)(18), the exemption is void if the claim appears in advertising — not just on the package. Calling your granola "high protein" in an Instagram caption is enough to require the panel on the bag.

What you can and can't make in Alaska

Alaska uses an exclusion model, and an unusually wide one. "Homemade food" means "a food or drink that is prepared or processed in a producer's private home kitchen" or in "a private or commercial kitchen leased to a producer" (AS 17.20.338(6)). That includes potentially hazardous foods, the refrigerated items most states ban, with one condition: under 17.20.332(f), the seller of a potentially hazardous homemade food, other than eggs, must be the producer.

Allowed:

Prohibited, under AS 17.20.332(b)(3):

A bill introduced in 2026, SB 226, proposed adding potentially hazardous homemade food in reduced-oxygen packaging to the prohibited list. It was heard and held in committee in April 2026 and is not law. Vacuum-sealed refrigerated products are legal under the current statute; whether that stays true is for a future session.

If your product is on that prohibited list, cottage food law is not your path. You'll need a licensed commercial or shared-use kitchen and a DEC food establishment permit, and once you're operating out of one you're a food manufacturer under federal law — which means full labeling, including a Nutrition Facts panel unless you qualify for the small business exemption below.

Where you can sell

AS 17.20.332(b) requires that the sale be "only for personal consumption" and "occur in the state at a farmers' market, an agricultural fair, a farm, a ranch, the producer's home or office, the retail location of a third-party seller, or a location agreed on between the producer and the buyer." It does not mention internet orders or mail, so we won't tell you they're allowed or banned. DEC's homemade food page is the place to ask before you build a shipping business.

Section 17.20.332(c) is the hard wall: "a homemade food may not be sold or used in a commercial food establishment," so no restaurant menus and no ingredient sales to other food businesses. A retailer that carries potentially hazardous homemade food has to physically separate it from inspected food, with a separate door, register, storage, and signage.

Alaska is one of the few states whose statute bans interstate sales outright: a homemade food sale "may not involve interstate commerce" (17.20.332(b)(3)(A)).

Interstate is a hard no everywhere, and the reason is jurisdictional rather than arbitrary: the moment a product crosses a state line it enters interstate commerce and FDA has authority over the whole operation that made it. Your state's cottage food exemption cannot exempt you from federal law. If you ship to one customer in another state, you have stepped outside the exemption for that shipment.

The cap, the permit, and the training

The exemption is broad but not absolute. AS 17.20.336 preserves DEC's power to investigate illness and condemn misbranded or adulterated food, and says nothing in the exemption relieves you of "applicable federal and local laws, regulations, and ordinances regarding food." Municipalities can layer their own rules, so check with yours. DEC has also opened a public scoping process on further updates to its cottage food regulations in 18 AAC 31, which means the administrative side could still move.

When you outgrow cottage food

With no cap, nobody outgrows Alaska cottage food by volume. Any of these ends the exemption:

• A restaurant wants your product on its menu, or another food business wants it as an ingredient.
• You want to ship out of state.
• You want to make seafood products, which is the one category Alaskans ask about most.
• You want to say "high protein" on the bag.
• A grocery buyer says yes and asks for a panel.

Whichever one gets you first, the day after it happens you are a food manufacturer, and food manufacturers label under 21 CFR 101.9. Your label now needs a Nutrition Facts panel with a serving size pulled from the RACC table in 21 CFR 101.12 — not a serving size you chose.

You might still be exempt, even out of a commercial kitchen

21 CFR 101.9(j)(18) exempts small businesses from the Nutrition Facts requirement if you have fewer than 100 full-time equivalent employees and sell fewer than 100,000 units in the US in a 12-month period. You have to file an annual notice with FDA to claim it. FDA is blunt about the follow-up: "FDA DOES NOT NOTIFY FIRMS WHEN IT IS TIME TO FILE A NOTICE." That's on you.

There's a smaller carve-out under the same section: if you're not an importer, have fewer than 10 full-time equivalent employees, and sell fewer than 10,000 units a year, you don't have to file anything at all.

And the exemption is void — filed or not — for any product carrying a nutrient content claim, a health claim, or other nutrition information, whether that appears on the label, in labeling, or in advertising. See FDA's labeling guidance for the full text.

If you've hit one of the triggers and need the panel itself, Nutrillius builds an FDA-compliant Nutrition Facts panel from your recipe in about a minute — $39 one time, no subscription. That's against $1,609–$1,724 for a single lab-analyzed sample at Medallion Labs, or $195 and a two-to-four week wait through a university extension lab.

Verify this yourself

Cottage food law changes most legislative sessions, and Alaska has moved twice recently: the 2024 statute and the 2025 repeal of the old regulation, with DEC now scoping further rule changes. Before you print labels, check the current rules with the agency directly:

• Alaska DEC — Homemade Food and its requirements page
• AS 17.20.332–17.20.338: Alaska Statutes, Title 17
• HB 251 (2024), enrolled text (PDF)
• DEC notice repealing 18 AAC 31.012(a)

This page was last reviewed October 30, 2026. If you're reading it much later than that, verify the disclaimer wording and the prohibited-food list before you rely on either.