Montana cottage food label requirements

Montana is unusual because it gives you two legal routes out of the same home kitchen. The first is the registered cottage food operation under MCA §§ 50-50-116 and 50-50-117, which has the label above. The second is the Montana Local Food Choice Act, MCA §§ 50-49-201 through 50-49-203, which exempts "homemade food" from licensing and labeling entirely as long as you sell directly to an informed consumer inside Montana. Neither route has a sales cap. There are five situations where the answer on the panel flips and you do need one. They're below, after the part you actually came for.

The label Montana actually requires

Under MCA § 50-50-116(2)(b), a registered cottage food operation must package and label every product before sale with, at a minimum:

1. The name, address, city, state, and zip code of the cottage food operation. Your home address. Montana offers no registration number substitute.
2. The name of the cottage food product.
3. The ingredients, in descending order of predominance by weight. Sub-ingredients count. If your chocolate chips contain soy lecithin, that has to show up.
4. The net quantity, weight, count, or volume. The Department of Public Health and Human Services asks for metric alongside US units.
5. Allergen labeling "as specified by federal and state labeling requirements." Federal law covers nine: 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."
6. "If a nutritional claim is made, an appropriate label if required by federal law." Montana wrote the first trigger into its own statute, the same way Florida did. Say "low sugar" and the state itself requires the nutrition information behind it.
7. The Montana disclosure, word for word.

The exact disclaimer wording

Made in a home kitchen that is not subject to retail food establishment regulations or inspections.

Section 50-50-116(2)(b)(vii) requires it "printed in at least the equivalent of 11-point font size in a color that provides a clear contrast to the background and is conspicuously placed on the principal label." Sentence case, one sentence, ending in a period.

Don't paraphrase it, don't shrink it below 11 point, and don't bury it on the bottom of the jar. "Principal label" means the panel the customer sees first. For items that can't be packaged, like a wedding cake, DPHHS says all the label elements go on the invoice and the invoice travels with the cake.

The Local Food Choice Act has no label

If you sell under the Local Food Choice Act instead, § 50-49-203(1)(a) says no state or local agency "may require licensure, permitting, certification, packaging, labeling, testing, sampling, or inspection." There is no disclaimer and no prescribed wording. What you must do, under § 50-49-203(3), is inform the end consumer that the food "has not been licensed, permitted, certified, packaged, labeled, or inspected per any official regulations." A sign at your table, a line on your order form, or a sticker all work. DPHHS adds that health claims are off limits "on labels, advertisements, social media, verbally, etc."

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.

Montana has no cap, so trigger three never arrives on its own. Trigger four is the one that gets Montana makers: both routes ban sales to retail food establishments, and DPHHS is explicit that putting your product in a grocery store or coffee shop requires a wholesale food license. The first store account is the day the cottage label stops being enough.

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 Montana

The two routes use opposite models. The registered cottage food route is an approved-list model: only "non-potentially hazardous" foods that don't need refrigeration, as defined in DPHHS rule, and your recipes and labels go in with your registration. The Local Food Choice Act is an exclusion model: any "homemade food" is allowed unless the act excludes it, which brings refrigerated foods, raw milk from a small dairy, and farm eggs into scope.

Allowed under cottage food registration (non-potentially hazardous only):

• Breads, cookies, cakes, cupcakes, and pies that don't need refrigeration
• Jams, jellies, and some fruit butters
• Candies, cotton candy, candy mints
• Dry mixes, granola, roasted coffee, popcorn, nuts
• Honey

Prohibited under cottage food registration, per DPHHS guidance:

Prohibited under the Local Food Choice Act, per § 50-49-203:

If your product is meat, jerky, or anything else on those lists, cottage food law is not your path. You'll need a licensed commercial or shared-use kitchen and a retail or wholesale food license, 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

The Local Food Choice Act writes the boundary into the statute: transactions "must occur only in this state and may not involve interstate commerce." The cottage food statute doesn't say it in those words, but DPHHS guidance does, and the registration is with your county, so the practical answer is the same.

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

Registration under § 50-50-117 means sending your county sanitarian your operation name, the home address where you'll produce and store, a description of ingredient sources, your product list, and a copy of every label. The fee is set by DPHHS rule and the county keeps it. The one quirk: if you only sell farmers-market-exempt items and only at farmers markets, DPHHS says you don't need to register at all.

The Local Food Choice Act skips the paperwork, though a small dairy selling raw milk under it must test every six months, and a privately run farmers market can still require vendors to register as a condition of a booth.

When you outgrow cottage food

There is no dollar ceiling in Montana, so the exits are about what and where. Any of these ends the exemption:

• A grocery store, coffee shop, or restaurant wants to carry you.
• You want to ship orders instead of handing them over in person.
• You want to sell in Idaho, Wyoming, or anywhere else out of state.
• You want to make cheesecake or fermented pickles under the registered route, or anything with meat under either route.
• You want to say "high protein" on the bag.

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 Montana has moved three times since 2021: SB 199 created the Local Food Choice Act that year, and the legislature amended § 50-49-203 again in 2023 (Ch. 347) and 2025 (Ch. 344). Before you print labels, check the current rules with the agency directly:

• Montana DPHHS — Cottage Food and Farmers Market Information
• MCA § 50-50-116: Conditions for cottage food operation exemption and § 50-50-117, registration and fee
• MCA § 50-49-203: Montana Local Food Choice Act, exemptions and transactions
• DPHHS Montana Local Food Choice Act Guidance and FAQ (PDF)

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