New york cottage food label requirements

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 New York actually requires

Every prepackaged home-processed product you sell in New York needs all of the following on the label:

1. The name and address of the home processor. Ag & Markets says the address must be complete: street address or PO Box, city, state, and ZIP code. A PO Box is acceptable, which is the privacy option if you don't want your street on a cookie bag.
2. The common or usual name of the food. "Oatmeal cookies," not "Grandma's Bites."
3. The ingredient list, in descending order by weight. Sub-ingredients count. If your chocolate chips contain soy lecithin, that has to show up. The regulation lets you group spices, flavorings, and colorings under those generic words.
4. Allergen declaration. Ag & Markets requires that "All allergens (eggs, milk, fish, shellfish, soybeans, peanuts, tree nuts, wheat, and sesame) must be clearly identified in the product ingredient statement." 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."
5. Net weight, standard measure, or numerical count. The regulation accepts any of the three.
6. A home-kitchen statement. New York recommends one but does not dictate the words. See below.

Two product-specific rules: glass jars of jams, jellies, and marmalades must have rigid metal lids (1 NYCRR 276.4(b)(3)), and everything must be packaged at home. You cannot package at the market.

The exact disclaimer wording

New York has no statutory disclaimer. 1 NYCRR 276.4(b) does not contain one, and the Ag & Markets home processing page says only that home processors "should also add a phrase such as" one of these, in type at least 1/16 inch tall:

Made in a Home Kitchen

The other two examples the department gives are "Made at Home by XYZ" and "Made in the Home Kitchen of XYZ." The department's own sample label uses "Made in a Home Kitchen" with a "Contains:" line beneath the ingredients.

Because the wording is recommended rather than mandated, no inspector is going to reject "Made in a Home Kitchen" for a missing comma. Use one of the three department phrases as written anyway. Don't invent your own, and don't bury it in 4-point type on the bottom seam.

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.

New York is the exception on trigger four. A registered home processor can sell wholesale to local restaurants, cafes, and grocery stores inside the state. That doesn't make the law require a panel, but a grocery buyer shelving your granola next to commercial brands will usually ask for one as a condition of carrying you. In New York, the retail buyer is the most common reason a home processor ends up needing a panel.

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 New York

New York uses an approved-list model. Ag & Markets publishes the list, and your registration covers only the products you put on the form. If it isn't on the list, you can't make it as a home processor. The regulation's own boundary (1 NYCRR 276.3(b)(3)) excludes potentially hazardous foods, low-acid canned foods, and acidified foods such as pickles and relishes.

Allowed, per the Ag & Markets home processing page:

Prohibited:

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 an Article 20-C food processing 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. Hot sauce, salsa, pickle, nut butter, and coffee makers are the usual New Yorkers who discover this.

Where you can sell

The wholesale allowance is unusual and worth reading twice. Most states stop you at the consumer. New York lets a registered home processor sell to an in-state cafe or grocery that resells the product. What you cannot do is open a licensed food business and keep processing at home. The department says a registration becomes "Null & Void" if you open a permitted or licensed food business or make a prohibited product.

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 is tied to the address. Move house and you re-register. Add a product and you file a supplemental registration. Commercial equipment is not allowed in a home processor kitchen. Zoning is the local layer here: Ag & Markets tells you to check with your town before you start, and New York City home processors should confirm nothing in their building's rules or lease forbids a home business.

One pending change to watch: Assembly bill A5836, the "Homegrown Foods Act," would create a separate home-based food operation category under a new Article 20-A. As of this review it sits in the Assembly Agriculture Committee and is not law.

When you outgrow cottage food

With no sales cap, New York makers don't "outgrow" the exemption on revenue. They leave it for one of these reasons:

• You want to make something on the prohibited list — sauce, pickles, cheesecake, nut butter, roasted coffee.
• You want to ship to customers outside New York.
• You want to open a storefront, which requires a permit that voids the exemption.
• A grocery or distributor wants a Nutrition Facts panel.
• 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 New York has a bill in committee that would add a second home-food category. Before you print labels, check the current rules with the agency directly:

• NYS Department of Agriculture and Markets — Home Processing
• 1 NYCRR 276.4(b): Application of general certification standards (home-processed foods)
• Assembly Bill A5836 (2025–2026), Homegrown Foods Act

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