cottage food labels: what's actually required

Cottage food labeling in 60 seconds

Cottage food laws let you make lower-risk foods (baked goods, jams, candies, granola, dry mixes) in a home kitchen and sell them — usually within your state — without a commercial facility. In exchange, every state requires specific labeling so customers know what they’re buying and where it came from. The requirements are simpler than full FDA packaged-food labeling, but they are mandatory, and the allergen piece carries real liability.

The 6 label elements virtually every state requires

1. Product name— the common name of the food (“Strawberry Jam”, “Chocolate Chip Cookies”).
2. Your name and address — the producer or business name and the address where the food was made (some states allow a registration number instead of a street address).
3. Ingredient list — every ingredient in descending order by weight, with sub-ingredients in parentheses (“chocolate chips (sugar, chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, soy lecithin)”) — same convention as commercial labels.
4. Net weight or volume— in both US customary and metric units (e.g. “Net Wt 12 oz (340g)”).
5. Allergen declaration — see below.
6. The home-kitchen disclosure — a state-mandated statement along the lines of “Made in a home kitchen not inspected by the [state] Department of Health”. The exact wording, and sometimes minimum type size, is set by your state — copy it verbatim from your state’s program page.

Allergens: the part you cannot skip

Federal allergen law recognizes nine major allergens — milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans and sesame (added by the FASTER Act) — and cottage food programs consistently require them to be identified, either by name in the ingredient list or in a “Contains:” statement right after it. Two details home producers miss:

• Be specificwith tree nuts and fish: “almonds”, “walnuts”, “cod” — not just the category.
• Hidden sources count: butter (milk), mayonnaise (egg), regular flour (wheat), chocolate chips (often soy lecithin, sometimes milk).

The Nutrillius generator auto-detects Big-9 allergens from your ingredient list and writes the Contains statement for you — worth using even if you only need the ingredient list.

What a complete cottage food label looks like

Here’s every required element assembled, for a fictional batch of chocolate chip cookies sold at a farmers market:

Chocolate Chip Cookies

INGREDIENTS: Wheat flour, chocolate chips (sugar, chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, soy lecithin), butter (cream, salt), brown sugar, cane sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, baking soda, salt.

Contains: Wheat, Milk, Soy, Eggs.

Net Wt 12 oz (340g)

Made by Jane Baker · 123 Maple St, Sacramento, CA 95814

“Made in a home kitchen that is not inspected by a government food safety agency” (use your state’s exact wording)

Note the details that trip people up: chocolate chips broken out into sub-ingredients (revealing the soy lecithin), butter’s milk source captured in the Contains statement, both US and metric net weight, and the disclosure in the state’s language rather than paraphrased.

Do you need a Nutrition Facts panel? Usually not — with 3 exceptions

Most state cottage food laws do not require a Nutrition Facts panel, and small producers selling in-state typically also fit FDA small-business exemptions. The three situations that change the answer:

1. You make a nutrition claim.Put “low sugar”, “keto”, “high protein” or any nutrient claim on the label or listing, and a compliant panel is generally required to back it up.
2. You sell across state lines(or through channels your cottage law doesn’t cover) — you’re now in standard FDA labeling territory.
3. Your buyer demands it. Grocery buyers, coffee-shop wholesale accounts and some online marketplaces ask for a panel regardless of legal requirement.

Why many cottage producers add one anyway

A Nutrition Facts panel is the fastest visual signal that a product is “real”. Producers tell us it helps close wholesale accounts, justifies premium pricing at markets, and answers the “how many calories?” question before it’s asked. Since the cost via the database method is now a one-time $39 rather than a lab bill, the calculus has changed — you can look retail-ready from your first farmers market.

When you outgrow cottage food

The moment you move into a commercial kitchen, hire a co-packer, or ship interstate, full FDA labeling applies: the complete Nutrition Facts process with 21 CFR 101.9 rounding, RACC-based serving sizes and format rules. If your cottage label was built in a real generator, that transition is a re-export — not a redesign.