Washington cottage food label requirements

Washington is stricter than most states, and it's worth knowing that going in. This is a real permit, not a registration: an application packet, a fee, a food worker card, a water test, recipe and label review, and an inspection of your kitchen before you're permitted and again every year after. If you're comparing states, Washington sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Tennessee.

The label Washington actually requires

RCW 69.22.020(3) and WAC 16-149-110 list seven elements. Every cottage food product you sell needs all of them:

1. Your business name and your WSDA permit number. Both. The permit number is the element people leave off.
2. The name of the cottage food product. "Oatmeal raisin cookies," not "Grandma's Best."
3. The ingredient list, in descending order by weight. Sub-ingredients count. If your chocolate chips contain soy lecithin, that has to show up.
4. The net weight or net volume. In US customary units.
5. Allergen information as specified by federal labeling requirements. That's nine allergens: milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame, with sesame added by the FASTER Act on January 1, 2023. Declare them parenthetically in the ingredient list or in a separate "Contains" statement. Tree nuts, fish, and shellfish must be named by species — "walnuts," not "tree nuts."
6. Nutritional information, if any nutritional claim is made. More on that below.
7. The Washington disclosure statement, word for word.

Your labels are not just your problem, either. WSDA reviews them as part of the permit application — you submit one label per product variation along with your recipes. A label that's wrong doesn't get you a warning letter; it gets your application held up.

The exact statement wording

Made in a home kitchen that has not been subject to standard inspection criteria.

RCW 69.22.020(3)(g) requires it "in at least eleven-point font in a color that provides a clear contrast to the background." Sentence case, ending in a period.

One wrinkle worth knowing: WSDA's rule at WAC 16-149-110 prints the same sentence with "Home Kitchen" capitalized, and some WSDA handouts set it in all caps. The words and the punctuation are identical across all three; only the capitalization varies. The statutory sentence-case version above is the safest thing to print, and it matches WSDA's own application packet. What you must not do is paraphrase it, shorten it to "made in a home kitchen," or set it in 8-point grey on a kraft background.

Washington wrote the trigger into its own statute

Look again at element six: nutritional information is required if any nutritional claim is made.

The moment your package says "low sugar," "high protein," "keto," or "sugar free," the same statute that lets you operate out of a home kitchen turns around and requires the nutrition information backing that claim up. There's no cottage food carve-out for claims. This is the most common way a Washington maker who genuinely didn't need a panel ends up needing one.

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.

In Washington, trigger three is the one that gets people, because $35,000 is a low ceiling. A baker doing two farmers markets a weekend can reach it inside a season, and RCW 69.22.050 requires you to stop selling for the rest of the permit period the moment you cross it unless you've obtained a food processing plant license under chapter 69.07 RCW. Trigger four is close behind: Washington permits no retail, no wholesale, and no consignment at all, so a shop wanting to stock you is automatically a graduation event.

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 Washington

Washington uses an approved-list model, and a narrow one. WAC 16-149-120 sets out what's allowed; if a product isn't on the list, you can't make it under this permit. You also may only produce the specific products listed on your permit, from a recipe file capped at 50 master recipes.

Allowed: non-potentially-hazardous baked goods including breads, cakes, cookies, crackers, pastries, and fruit pies; candies including brittles, fudge, caramels, taffy, and molded chocolates; jams, jellies, preserves, and fruit butters meeting the federal standards of identity; dried herbs, seasoning mixes, tea, and coffee; nuts and snack mixes; cereals and granola; rebottled vinegars from approved sources.

Prohibited under WAC 16-149-130:

If your product is on that list, cottage food law is not your path in Washington. Sauce makers, jerky makers, picklers, and anyone doing a fermented product need a licensed commercial or shared-use kitchen and a WSDA food processor license under chapter 69.07 RCW. Once you're operating out of one you're a food manufacturer under federal law — full labeling, including a Nutrition Facts panel, unless you qualify for the small business exemption below.

Where you can sell

Washington is one of the tightest states in the country on channels. RCW 69.22.010 defines a cottage food operation as producing "only for sale directly to the consumer," and WAC 16-149-040 spells out the rest: no shipping, no mail order, no consignment, no wholesale, and no selling outside the state. Your product may not be repackaged, used as an ingredient by a food processing plant, or sold by a food service establishment.

You may run a website. WAC 16-149-040 permits one "displaying available products provided any sales arising from the website are completed as in-person transactions." So you can take the order online. You cannot put it in a box.

Interstate is a hard no here, and the statute and rule both say so. The reason is also jurisdictional: 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 permit cannot exempt you from federal law.

The cap, the permit, and the inspection

The cap and the permit term both changed recently. House Bill 1500, chapter 352, Laws of 2023, effective July 23, 2023, raised the cap from $25,000 to $35,000 and moved the permit from annual to biennial. The cap is computed per domestic residence, not per person, so two people baking in one house share one $35,000 ceiling. WSDA reviews the figure every four years and adjusts it to the Seattle-area Consumer Price Index by expedited rulemaking, so confirm the current-year number before you cut it close. WSDA can also require written documentation verifying your gross sales.

The $355 is the two-year total, and it breaks out into statutory pieces: a $125 basic hygiene inspection fee under RCW 69.22.040(3), a $75 public health review fee and a $30 processing fee under RCW 69.22.030, plus the $125 inspection in year two. Adding products outside a renewal costs $105. None of it is refundable. Note that WSDA's older cottage food permit handout still shows $230 and a $25,000 cap — those are the pre-2023 numbers.

Everyone who will handle production needs a Washington food worker card under chapter 69.06 RCW before you apply. It costs $10 from your local health department, and the first card is valid two years. You'll also need a state business license, a water test or recent water bill, a floor plan, a sanitation plan, and your recipes and labels. Then WSDA inspects the kitchen, and inspects again roughly a year later. WSDA may delegate inspections to a local health jurisdiction.

When you outgrow cottage food

At $35,000, most Washington makers who are serious about this will graduate. Any of these ends the exemption:

• You cross $35,000 in gross annual sales — and you must stop selling for the rest of the permit period.
• A shop or restaurant wants to stock you.
• You want to ship, instead of handing every order over in person.
• You want to make sauce, jerky, pickles, cheesecake, or anything fermented.
• You want to say "low sugar" on the bag.

Whichever comes first, the day after it happens you need a WSDA food processor license under chapter 69.07 RCW, and you label under 21 CFR 101.9. Your panel's serving size comes from the RACC table in 21 CFR 101.12, not from you, and a discrete unit holding 200% to 300% of the RACC needs a dual-column panel.

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 food labeling guide 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. Compare that to $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

Washington moved the cap and the permit term in 2023, and the cap is on a four-year inflation review, so the number can change without a new bill. Check before you print:

• WSDA — Cottage Food
• Chapter 69.22 RCW — Cottage Food Operations
• Chapter 16-149 WAC — Cottage Foods
• WSDA — What is the Cottage Foods Permit? (2025)

Last reviewed August 4, 2026. If you're reading this much later, confirm the cap and the statement wording before you rely on either.