North dakota cottage food label requirements

North Dakota is one of the lightest-touch states in the country. The statute bars any state agency or local government from requiring "licensure, permitting, certification, inspection, packaging, or labeling" for cottage food. The one obligation that survives is telling your customer what they're buying. 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 North Dakota actually requires

Under N.D.C.C. § 23-09.5-02, a cottage food operator must do the following. Only the first item is a label requirement in the usual sense.

1. The North Dakota consumer advisory statement, word for word, either on a label on the product or on a sign displayed at the point of sale. That choice is written into § 23-09.5-02(8). A sign at your farmers market table satisfies the statute; so does a sticker on the jar.
2. Inform the end consumer that the product "is not certified, labeled, licensed, packaged, regulated, or inspected." That's § 23-09.5-02(5). The advisory statement covers most of this, but the duty to inform is separate and it applies to every sale, including deliveries.
3. For products that need refrigeration, such as baked goods with cream, custard, meringue, cheesecake, pumpkin pie, and cream cheese, the statute (§ 23-09.5-02(7)) requires "safe handling instructions and a product disclosure statement indicating the product was transported and maintained frozen." No exact wording is prescribed for either.

That is the whole list. An ingredient list, an allergen declaration, net weight, and your name and address are not required by North Dakota cottage food law. Most makers add them anyway. The federal allergen list is milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame, with tree nuts, fish, and shellfish named by species, and a customer with a peanut allergy doesn't care which statute applies.

The exact disclaimer wording

This product is made in a home kitchen that is not inspected by the state or local health department.

That is the statement in § 23-09.5-02(8), sentence case, ending in a period. The statute sets no type size and no placement rule beyond "label on the cottage food product" or "consumer advisory sign at the point of sale." North Dakota Health and Human Services publishes a printable Consumer Advisory Notice with the same wording.

Don't paraphrase it, don't shorten it to "made in a home kitchen," and don't substitute another state's wording. A customer, a market manager, or an investigator responding to a complaint reads this string literally.

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.

North Dakota has no cap, so trigger three never arrives on its own. What gets North Dakota makers is trigger four: the statute flatly bars cottage food from any "food establishment, food processing plant, or food store," so the first grocery buyer who says yes is also the moment you become a licensed manufacturer.

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 North Dakota

North Dakota uses an exclusion model. The statute defines a cottage food product as "baked goods, jams, jellies, and other food and drink products produced by a cottage food operator." Anything not prohibited is allowed, including refrigerated foods, which get the extra labeling above. Health and Human Services tried to narrow this by rule in 2020; a Burleigh County district court struck those rules down in December 2020 and the department dropped its appeal in 2021, so the statute controls.

Allowed:

• Baked goods, including refrigerated items like cheesecake and cream pies (with safe handling instructions and the frozen-transport disclosure)
• Jams, jellies, and other food and drink products
• Poultry you raised yourself, if you slaughter no more than 1,000 birds a year, sell only your own, and the product is not adulterated or misbranded

Prohibited under § 23-09.5-02(3):

Two more limits come from elsewhere in the section: products may only be sold for "home consumption," and nothing except whole, unprocessed fruits and vegetables may be "sold or used in any food establishment, food processing plant, or food store."

If your product is meat, cottage food law is not your path. You'll need a licensed commercial or shared-use kitchen and, for meat, a state or federal grant of inspection. Once you're operating out of a licensed facility 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

This is where the 2025 session matters. Before SB 2386, § 23-09.5-02(3) said transactions "may not involve interstate commerce" and may not "be conducted over the internet or phone, through the mail, or by consignment." SB 2386 struck both lines. It passed 45-2 and 90-1, was signed and filed with the Secretary of State on March 20, 2025, and carried an emergency clause, so it took effect that day. The only interstate language left is the poultry ban.

What remains is the structure: every transaction must be "directly between the cottage food operator and the informed end consumer" and "only for home consumption." Taking an order online and delivering it, or mailing it, now fits that structure under state law.

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

Section 23-09.5-02(1) is unusually direct: no state agency or political subdivision "may require licensure, permitting, certification, inspection, packaging, or labeling" for cottage food. A city or county cannot layer a permit on top, and § 23-09.5-02(9) still lets the department investigate a complaint.

When you outgrow cottage food

There is no dollar ceiling to cross in North Dakota, so the exits are all about what and where. Any of these ends the exemption:

• You want to sell to a grocery store, a coffee shop, or any food establishment.
• You want to make jerky or any other meat product.
• You want to sell poultry across state lines.
• You want to say "high protein" on the bag.
• You list on Amazon.

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 North Dakota has moved twice in the last six years: a court threw out the department's restrictive rules in 2020, and SB 2386 rewrote the sales restrictions in March 2025. Before you print labels, check the current rules with the agency directly:

• North Dakota Health and Human Services — Cottage Food Act
• N.D.C.C. ch. 23-09.5: Cottage Food Production and Sales (PDF)
• SB 2386, 69th Legislative Assembly (2025), bill overview

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.