US Cottage Food Laws: Can You Sell Home-Made Food Online Across State Lines?
US cottage food laws allow home-made food to be sold locally, but selling across state lines online is more complicated. Here is what home food producers need to know.
Cottage food laws in the US permit home food producers to make and sell certain types of food without a commercial kitchen licence. But the laws vary by state and generally restrict direct-to-consumer, in-state sales only. What happens when you want to sell online nationally?
What Cottage Food Laws Allow
Most state cottage food laws permit: the sale of certain shelf-stable, low-risk food products (baked goods, jams, candy, dried herbs) made in a home kitchen, directly to consumers, in person or sometimes online, within the state.
Common restrictions: sales must be direct to the consumer (no wholesale to retailers), there is usually a revenue cap ($25,000–50,000 per year), and products must carry a label identifying them as cottage food.
The Interstate Commerce Problem
Cottage food exemptions are state-level. They do not exempt products from federal food law (FALCPA, FDA regulations). Selling food across state lines via your website means entering interstate commerce, which is regulated at the federal level.
The practical implication: cottage food sold across state lines may technically require FDA facility registration and FALCPA-compliant labelling.
The Reality for Small Online Sellers
Small online food sellers operating below FDA registration thresholds (less than $1 million in food sales) operate in a grey zone. The regulatory priority is on larger businesses. However, FALCPA labelling compliance remains a real obligation regardless of sales volume.
Display FALCPA-compliant allergen information on your home food business Shopify store with Allergen Matrix at saltai.app.
How State Laws Differ and Why It Matters for Your Shopify Store
State cottage food laws are not uniform, and the differences between them are significant enough to affect how you structure your online business. Some states, like California and Texas, have relatively permissive frameworks that allow online sales and home delivery within state borders. Others, such as New Jersey and New York, impose tighter restrictions on permitted product types, sales channels, and annual revenue thresholds. If you are operating a Shopify store and fulfilling orders from your home kitchen, you need to understand not only your own state's rules but also the rules of the states where your customers live.
The reason destination-state rules matter is that some legal interpretations hold that a sale is considered to take place where the buyer receives the goods. This means a customer in a state with stricter cottage food rules could theoretically trigger compliance obligations under that state's law, even if you are operating legally in your home state. This is a contested and evolving area, and no federal court has settled the question definitively for cottage food specifically. The uncertainty itself is a reason to take labelling and disclosure seriously from day one.
From a practical standpoint, the most protective approach for a small Shopify food seller is to clearly disclose your home kitchen status on your product pages and checkout flow, use FALCPA-compliant allergen labelling on every product listing, and consult a food law attorney before actively marketing to customers in states where you are unsure of your standing. This is not about building bureaucratic overhead into a small business — it is about making decisions with accurate information rather than assumptions about how regulators or courts might view your operation.
FALCPA Labelling: What It Requires and Why It Applies to You
The Food Allergen Labelling and Consumer Protection Act of 2004 (FALCPA) requires that packaged food sold in the United States clearly identifies the presence of any of the major food allergens. As of the FASTER Act of 2023, this list includes milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame. Each allergen must be declared either in the ingredient list using common names or in a separate "Contains" statement immediately after the ingredient list. This is not a voluntary best practice — it is a federal legal requirement that applies to food sold in interstate commerce regardless of the size of your business.
Many home food producers assume that FALCPA applies only to large manufacturers with formal labelling operations. That assumption is incorrect. If your product crosses state lines — and in most cases, a national Shopify store means it will — you are subject to federal food law, including FALCPA. The cottage food exemption your state provides does not suspend federal allergen labelling obligations. A buyer with a severe peanut allergy purchasing your baked goods in another state deserves the same level of disclosure they would receive from a commercial bakery, and the law reflects that expectation.
For Shopify store owners, FALCPA compliance has a digital dimension that physical product labels alone cannot satisfy. Customers browsing your store online make purchasing decisions based on what they read on your product pages. Displaying clear, accurate allergen information on those pages — not just on the physical label that arrives with the parcel — is both a legal best practice and a customer trust signal. Tools like Allergen Matrix are built specifically to help food sellers display structured allergen information on Shopify product pages in a format that is easy for customers to read and consistent across your entire catalogue.
FDA Registration and the Thresholds You Need to Know
FDA facility registration is required for facilities that manufacture, process, pack, or hold food for consumption in the United States. However, the FDA's definition of "facility" excludes farms and private residences — which is why many home-based food producers believe they are entirely outside the FDA's scope. The reality is more nuanced. If your home kitchen is being used exclusively for your cottage food business and not as a personal residence kitchen in the conventional sense, some interpretations of the rules could bring it closer to a regulated facility than a private home.
The $1 million annual food sales threshold that is often cited in discussion of FDA registration relates specifically to the Reportable Food Registry and certain FSMA exemptions, not to facility registration broadly. Qualified Facility status under FSMA (the Food Safety Modernization Act) offers modified requirements for businesses averaging less than $1 million in total annual food sales over the previous three years, provided more than half of sales are direct to consumers or to restaurants and retailers in the same state or within 275 miles. This is a meaningful exemption for genuinely local operations, but it does not apply cleanly to a nationally accessible Shopify store with no geographic restriction on orders.
The practical takeaway for small home food businesses selling online is that the regulatory framework was not designed with the modern e-commerce model in mind. A Shopify store with no shipping restrictions is not the same as a farmers market stall or a local farm stand. The exemptions written for those contexts do not translate automatically to an online store that can accept orders from any of the fifty states. This does not mean your business is illegal — it means you need to understand which rules apply, document your compliance steps, and take allergen labelling seriously as a baseline obligation that sits outside most of these exemptions entirely.
Building a Compliant and Trustworthy Online Presence
Beyond meeting minimum legal requirements, there is a strong commercial case for treating food safety transparency as a brand asset rather than a regulatory burden. Online food buyers — particularly those managing food allergies or intolerances — are sophisticated consumers who will read your product pages carefully before purchasing. If your allergen information is missing, buried in fine print, or inconsistent between your website and your physical labels, you will lose sales and potentially expose yourself to liability. A clear, well-structured allergen display is one of the simplest ways to build trust with the customers who need your products most.
Shopify gives you the tools to build a professional storefront, but it does not automatically solve the food-specific challenge of presenting allergen data in a structured, regulation-aware format. This is where purpose-built apps fill the gap. A solution that lets you manage allergen data centrally and display it consistently across every product page removes the risk of manual errors and makes it significantly easier to update your information when recipes change. Consistency between your online product information and your physical labels is also an important signal of operational seriousness if you are ever subject to a regulatory inquiry.
If you are a home food producer thinking about growing your Shopify store beyond local sales, the time to get allergen labelling right is before you scale, not after. The reputational and legal consequences of an allergen incident are severe, and they do not scale proportionally with business size — a small producer can face the same consequences as a large one. Starting with proper allergen disclosure practices means you are building on a foundation that can support growth rather than one that will need to be rebuilt under pressure.
Try Allergen Matrix free at saltai.app — no credit card required.
SaltAI Team
SaltAI builds focused Shopify apps for food merchants and general merchants. Every app is tested in production at a real food store — including Vanda's Kitchen — before it ships.