Cottage food law, state by state

seventeen, by the count in the table above: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee. In each of those an official source says there is no annual limit — which is not the same as the thirteen jurisdictions where no official source names a figure at all.

That we read that jurisdiction’s own department pages and statutes and none of them gives an annual sales figure. It is an absence we are reporting, not a permission we are granting. The thirteen in that position are Arkansas, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia. If you are approaching the point where a cap would matter, that is the moment to ask your state department directly.

It depends entirely on where you live, which is why it is the first column. Of the fifty-one, twenty-eight ask for nothing before your first sale, ten ask you to register, one asks for a permit, six want a permit and a kitchen inspection, and six give you two routes to choose between. Open your own state for what it actually involves.

Because it cannot be compressed into a cell without misleading you, and it is the rule most likely to decide how you work. Texas permits an online order only if you, an employee or a household member delivers it in person and the label information is on your site before the customer pays — three conditions, not one. New Jersey lets you take the order and the money online and never put the food in the post. Wisconsin bars internet sales outright. Each of those lives on its own state page, where it has the room to be true.

Each one is read from that state’s own agriculture or health department, or from the text of the statute or the enacted act, and linked beside the figure on that state’s page. Every state page carries the date it was last checked. No blogs, and no other people’s state-by-state tables, are used as sources.