Maine cottage food label requirements

There is a second layer. Under the Maine Food Sovereignty Act, 7 M.R.S. ch. 8-F, your town can adopt a local food ordinance, and for direct producer-to-consumer sales covered by that ordinance the State does not enforce its licensing rules at all. Whether that layer applies to you depends on where you live, not on what you make.

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 Maine actually requires

DACF's "Home Food License 101" guidance says all foods sold outside the home must be labelled with:

1. The common or usual name of the product. DACF's own examples: "apple pie, dill pickles." Not a brand name.
2. Ingredients in order of predominance, greatest to least by amount. Sub-ingredients count. If your chocolate chips contain soy lecithin, that has to show up.
3. Net weight, net volume, or numerical count.
4. Name, address, and zip code of the producer. DACF offers no ID-number substitute for the home address.
5. Allergen declaration. This one is not on DACF's list, but federal law covers nine allergens on packaged food: milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame. Sesame joined the list under the FASTER Act on January 1, 2023. You can declare them parenthetically inside the ingredient list or in a separate "Contains" statement. Tree nuts, fish, and shellfish must be named by species — "almonds," not "tree nuts."

One quirk worth the space: DACF says plainly that "No label is required if product is sold directly to the consumer from the home." A customer picking up bread at your door needs nothing. The same loaf at a farmers market needs all four elements. DACF also checks your labels before it issues the license, so get them right before the inspection rather than after.

The exact disclaimer wording

Maine has no required disclaimer. There is no "made in a home kitchen" sentence in Maine's food establishment licensing law or in DACF's Home Food License guidance. Don't borrow one from Vermont or Massachusetts; a statement that your kitchen is "not inspected" would be false in Maine, because DACF inspected it before issuing your license.

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.

Maine flips the usual order. A Home Food License already lets you sell at retail stores, so trigger four is not a legal line you cross; it is a commercial one. The grocery buyer who shelves your granola next to national brands is the person most likely to ask for a panel, and Maine law gives you nothing to point to that says you don't need one.

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 Maine

Maine uses a safety-category model rather than a product list. The Home Food License covers foods that are shelf-stable (non-potentially hazardous). Anything that has to be refrigerated or frozen to control microbial growth needs a commercial food processing license instead.

Allowed under a Home Food License:

Not allowed under a Home Food License:

The canned-goods rule is the one that surprises people. Maine lets you make pickles and hot sauce at home, which most states don't, but only after a process authority has reviewed the recipe for botulism risk.

If your product is on the refrigerated side of that line, the Home Food License is not your path. You'll need a licensed commercial or shared-use kitchen, 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

Retail is the big difference from almost every other state. A licensed Maine home kitchen can sell to the general store down the road without becoming something else. DACF's guidance says nothing about internet orders or shipping either way, so get a written answer from the Division of Quality Assurance and Regulations before you build a mail-order business on an assumption.

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 food sovereignty layer. Under 7 M.R.S. § 284, a municipality may adopt an ordinance "regarding traditional foodways and direct producer-to-consumer transactions," and the State "shall recognize such ordinances by not enforcing" its food laws for the transactions the ordinance governs. A direct transaction under § 282 includes sales on your own property, at roadside stands, fundraisers, farmers' markets, and community social events, and through buying clubs, deliveries, and CSAs. If your town has adopted one, those sales can happen without a Home Food License. Two limits: meat and poultry inspection is never waived (§ 285), and anything you make for sales outside the ordinance must comply with state and federal law (§ 286). Check with your town office, not DACF, for whether an ordinance exists.

The cap, the permit, and the training

The inspection checks concrete things: non-absorbent food-contact surfaces, smooth and cleanable floors and walls, a two-bay sink or a one-bay sink plus dishwasher with hot and cold water, a refrigerator thermometer holding 41°F or below, and, if you're on a well, an annual coliform and nitrate test. Pets may be in the processing area between batches but must be out, with surfaces washed and sanitized, before you start. Because this is a license rather than an exemption, there is no cap to grow out of; you outgrow the kitchen, not the law.

When you outgrow cottage food

Maine has no cap, so the exits look different here. Any of these ends the Home Food License path:

• You want to make anything that needs refrigeration.
• You want to make meat or poultry products.
• You want to ship out of state as a regular channel.
• 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 Maine has moved recently: Public Law 2025, chapter 309 (LD 124, "An Act to Protect the Right to Food") rewrote parts of the Food Sovereignty Act, added a definition of "kitchen," and applied the Act to every local food ordinance, effective September 24, 2025. Before you print labels, check the current rules with the agency directly:

• Maine DACF — Home Food License 101 (PDF)
• Maine DACF — Permits and Licenses, application forms
• 22 M.R.S. § 2167: License required
• 7 M.R.S. ch. 8-F: Maine Food Sovereignty Act

This page was last reviewed October 30, 2026. If you're reading it much later than that, verify the fee and the label elements before you rely on either.