Cottage Food Law and Microgreens: The National Picture

There is no federal cottage food law. There are fifty state laws that share a name, and for raw microgreens forty six of them are the wrong law. Four are not.

That last sentence is the whole page, and it is not a guess. This site carries a researched, cited guide for every state, and every one of those guides had to answer the cottage food question because growers keep arriving with it. So the honest way to answer it nationally is to count what fifty state pages actually say, rather than to reason from a general principle and hope.

The count is below, with the exceptions named. If you want your own state's answer rather than the national shape of it, start there instead.

Why there is nothing national to point at

Growers ask for the federal cottage food rule the way they ask for the federal produce rule, and the two questions have completely different answers. There is a federal produce rule: the FDA Produce Safety Rule covers microgreens, sets one national coverage threshold, and applies the same way in Boise and in Baton Rouge.

Cottage food has no equivalent. Every state wrote its own, at its own time, with its own list of eligible foods, its own cap or absence of one, its own labeling sentence and its own rules about who you may sell to. Some were passed in the 1990s and amended six times since. Arkansas repealed its Cottage Food Act outright in 2021 and replaced it with a Food Freedom Act. Kansas never created one. West Virginia rebuilt its framework on 12 June 2026 under Senate Bill 44. Indiana replaced its home based vendor scheme with a new statute on 1 July 2026.

So when a national blog post, a YouTube video or a Facebook group tells you what "the cottage food law" says about microgreens, it is describing at best one state and at worst a state that has since changed. That is the single most reliable source of bad advice in this subject, and it is the reason this page exists as a synthesis of fifty separate answers rather than as a summary of one rule.

The tally, counted from fifty state pages

Here is what the corpus actually says, classified by what each state's law does rather than by what its name suggests.

Forty six of fifty is not "most states" as a hedge. It is a count, and every state in it has its own page on this site with the citation that put it there.

Why the answer is structural rather than a matter of opinion

The near universal result is not an accident of drafting, and it is not regulators being unhelpful. Cottage food statutes fail on raw microgreens for two independent structural reasons, and a grower only has to lose on one of them.

The first is preparation. Almost every cottage food definition in the country is written around food prepared, made or processed in a private home kitchen. Arizona defines it that way at A.R.S. 36-931. Montana requires a registered area of a domestic residence. South Dakota's SDCL 34-18-35 covers food prepared at a residence. Nebraska's section 81-2,280 covers a producer of food at a private home. A tray of microgreens under a rack of lights was not prepared. It was grown and then cut. The verb does not fit, and no amount of selling from your kitchen table changes which verb applies.

The second is temperature. Cottage food regimes exist for food that is safe at room temperature, usually written as non potentially hazardous or non time and temperature control for safety. Cut microgreens need refrigeration. Pennsylvania's Limited Food Establishment category settles the question in one line, because it is limited to foods that do not require finished product refrigeration. Washington states plainly that foods requiring refrigeration are not allowed. Utah's cottage food program excludes refrigerated and temperature controlled foods. Iowa's route reaches only non temperature controlled home food, which refrigerated greens fail on both halves at once.

Several states remove the guesswork rather than leaving you to infer it. Connecticut's prohibited cottage food products list expressly names fresh fruit or vegetables, which is a rare thing to be able to write. Colorado lists cut fresh fruits and vegetables as ineligible. Michigan's vegetable list excludes cut leafy greens and raw seed sprouts.

And a handful use a closed list instead of a category, which decides the matter by omission. Ohio's rule enumerates twenty approved products and the nearest entry is dry herbs. Nevada's NRS 580.600 lists nuts, candies, jams, vinegar, dry herbs, dried fruits, cereals, trail mixes, popcorn and qualifying baked goods. Virginia's home exception is a closed list of processed, non temperature controlled foods. Louisiana's statute names nine categories, none of them a living or cut green.

The four states where it genuinely is your law

These are the exceptions, and each one is an exception for a different reason.

Two of those deserve a note, because they cut against the pattern in opposite directions.

Illinois is the one state where a grower looking in the cottage food statute is looking in the right place. It is also the state where the number everybody quotes is misread most often: the $50 in Section 4 is a ceiling on what a county may charge you, not a limit on what you may sell. The real entry cost is the requirement that every person preparing or packaging the product hold a Department approved certified food protection manager qualification.

Utah is the opposite case. Its cottage food program is as closed to produce as anyone's, but the statute sitting next to it is unusually generous, and it does something no other state in this series does: it writes the restaurant sale into the text. In Indiana the exemption ends at the restaurant door. In Utah it does not, so long as the vegetable is raw and unprocessed.

Four near misses, which are more dangerous than a clean no

A flat no is cheap. What costs growers money is a statute that contains a sentence about raw produce, because that sentence looks like permission.

Wyoming is the clearest case in the country. The state is famous for its Food Freedom Act, and growers arrive expecting it to be the answer. The Act is capped at 250,000 products and $250,000 in gross revenue and is built around food prepared in a private home kitchen, and it cannot cross a state line at all. The exemption that actually carries a microgreens crop is somewhere else entirely, in the licensing statute at 35-7-124, covering any raw agricultural commodity the producer grows. It has no cap, and it survives a sale to a restaurant. Reach for the famous law and you accept a ceiling you were never subject to, plus a required disclosure stating your food was made in a home kitchen, which is false about a crop.

Nebraska puts both doors in the same statute. Section 81-2,245.01 carries a produce exclusion at subsection (2) and a private home food carve-out at subsection (7), and section 81-2,280 builds the cottage food scheme on the second one. Growers pick the wrong one because they do grow at home. The cost is registration, food safety training, notice, labeling and delivery duties that the produce exclusion never imposed.

Montana has a Local Food Choice Act that preserves one narrow produce point: raw, unprocessed fruit and vegetables are excepted from that Act's prohibition on selling homemade food through a retail food establishment. That is a carve-out inside a homemade food statute. It is not a license, and it is not a route around Montana's own Produce Act threshold.

North Dakota is the genuinely arguable one. NDCC chapter 23-09.5 defines cottage food as baked goods, jams, jellies and other food and drink products produced in a private home kitchen, and read literally a microgreens product actually produced or packaged in that kitchen could fit the language. That is narrow and fact sensitive, not a general growing permit, and a crop grown on racks in another room should not be assumed to fit at all. The channel limits close it anyway: SB 2386, signed 21 March 2025, bars interstate, internet, telephone, mail and consignment transactions outright.

Maine belongs in the same family for a different reason. Its Food Sovereignty Act lets a town adopt a local food ordinance that displaces state licensing, which sounds decisive until you notice that the municipality has to have actually adopted one, and that the state default already says no license is required for selling only fresh produce. The Act gives you nothing because there was nothing to give.

The trap, stated plainly

Here is the mistake, in the order growers actually make it. You search for your state's cottage food law. You find the word "exemption" in it. You read the exemption, decide it covers you, and start selling on the strength of it.

The exemption is real. It is just not the one you are relying on.

In almost every state, the thing that lets you sell raw microgreens without a food license is a raw agricultural commodity definition or a produce exclusion, and it lives somewhere completely different in the code: in the food establishment definition, in the retail food store definition, in a produce statute, or in an administrative rule about food safety. Alaska is the clearest illustration, because its exemption names microgreens outright at 18 AAC 31.012(b)(3) and it sits in the food code, not in anything called cottage food. Kansas puts it at K.S.A. 65-689(d)(4), a direct sale exemption with no dollar amount in it at all. Minnesota treats microgreens as products of the farm under 28A.15, which is a different statute from the cottage food exemption at 28A.152.

Two things follow from picking the wrong door, and they are both worse than they sound.

You inherit duties you never owed. Cottage food routes carry registration, training, fees, prescribed labeling and channel restrictions. The produce exclusions mostly carry none of those. Nebraska's page makes this point sharply: a grower who self identifies as a cottage food producer volunteers for obligations the statute never put on them.

You put a false statement on your package. Most cottage food regimes require a disclosure that the food was made in a home kitchen that is not inspected. South Dakota's SDCL 34-18-37 sets out the elements, and a home kitchen disclaimer on a produce clamshell claims a category you are not in. Alabama, Georgia and Wyoming all warn about the same thing from different directions. It misdescribes your product to your customer and to your regulator at the same time.

There is a third consequence that only bites later. Cottage food is built for direct sales, so its channel rules are restrictive by design. Arizona forbids a cottage food product being used as an ingredient in a permitted restaurant. Washington's permit cannot be shipped, mail ordered, wholesaled, consigned or sold outside the state. Mississippi bans internet and mail order sales, a ban that simply does not reach a produce grower. A grower who believes they are a cottage food operator concludes they cannot sell to chefs, which is usually wrong and usually the most valuable channel they have.

The caps, and why almost none of them are yours

The numbers are what draw people in. Someone in a forum says their state allows $35,000, another says $250,000, and a grower starts planning revenue around a ceiling that was never theirs.

Notice how little those figures have in common. They range across a factor of fifty, several are being amended, and a good number of states have removed theirs entirely: Alabama, Arizona, Delaware in its 2023 rulemaking, Missouri when HB 1697 struck the $50,000 condition in 2022, Iowa when HF 2431 replaced the limit in 2023, and New Hampshire when HB 304 removed its cap in July 2025.

A cap only matters for a product the permit can cover in the first place. Yours is not one of them in forty six states, so the number is not a ceiling you are approaching. It is a fact about a different business.

When cottage food genuinely does become your law

All of the above is about raw microgreens. Change the product and the answer flips, cleanly and immediately.

The moment you dry your microgreens into a powder, blend them into a seasoning mix, jar a pesto or bake them into something, you have made a processed food in a home kitchen. That is precisely what cottage food statutes were written for, and at that point the statute stops being irrelevant and starts being the one you register under.

The dried products are the natural fit, because they land on the eligible lists. Ohio's enumerated rule includes dry herbs and dry cereal and nut snack mixes. Nevada's list includes dry herbs and seasoning mixes. Georgia's covers dried fruits and dry herbs. Colorado treats dried and freeze dried produce as eligible where the fresh cut version is not. A shelf stable microgreen powder is a genuinely different legal object from the tray it came out of.

Two cautions before you build a product line on it.

A pesto is not a dried herb. Anything that needs refrigeration walks straight back into the same wall that closed the door on the fresh crop, and several states will treat it as a food processing question instead. West Virginia's own material treats cut produce as potentially hazardous, which tells you how a value added wet product is likely to be read.

You will be running two regimes off one table. Louisiana's page puts it well: a grower selling qualifying jam alongside raw greens at the same market stall is operating under two different legal frameworks simultaneously. The greens are produce under one set of rules. The jam is cottage food under another, with its own cap, its own label and its own restriction on who may buy it. Keep the paperwork, the labeling and the channels separate in your own head, because the regulator certainly will.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is there a federal cottage food law I should be reading? A: No. The category exists only in state law, which is why national advice about it is unreliable. The federal layer that does apply to microgreens is the FDA Produce Safety Rule, and it is a food safety rule rather than a licensing exemption.

Q: My state's cottage food law has an exemption in it. Does that cover my microgreens? A: In forty six states, no, and the exemption you actually rely on is somewhere else in the code, usually a raw agricultural commodity definition or a produce exclusion. Find that one instead. It normally carries fewer duties, no cap and no home kitchen disclaimer.

Q: Which states are the exceptions? A: Illinois, where the cottage food statute names microgreens. Arkansas, where the Food Freedom Act that replaced cottage food covers true leaf microgreens cut once. Indiana, where the new IC 16-42-5.4 names produce explicitly. Utah, where the Home Consumption and Homemade Food Act reaches raw unprocessed vegetables and even permits the restaurant sale.

Q: I grow in my house. Does that make it cottage food? A: No. Cottage food turns on what you did to the food, not on the building you did it in. Growing and harvesting a crop is not preparing food in a kitchen, and Nebraska's page spells out exactly what that mistake costs.

Q: Can I put the cottage food label on my clamshells to be safe? A: Do not. A home kitchen disclaimer claims a legal category you are not in, and it tells your customer and your inspector something untrue about your product. Alabama, Georgia, South Dakota and Wyoming all make the same point.

Q: If cottage food does not cover me, what does? A: Your state's produce or raw agricultural commodity position, plus federal produce safety if you are over the coverage threshold. That is exactly what each state guide on this site works out, so go to your own state's page rather than reasoning from this one.

Final thoughts

The most useful thing about counting fifty states is what it kills. It kills the idea that there is a national answer to be found and that you simply have not found it yet. There is no national answer, and the state answers do not converge on one either. What they converge on is a shape: cottage food is a home kitchen law for shelf stable processed goods, raw produce lives elsewhere in the code, and four legislatures wrote it differently.

If you take one habit from this page, make it this one. When you find a promising exemption, check what noun it applies to before you check what number is attached to it. Almost every expensive mistake in this subject comes from a grower who read the cap and skipped the definition.

If your state agency has told you something that contradicts your state page here, tell me and I will check it. A page that is wrong about a rule is worse than no page.

Sources

This page is a synthesis of the fifty state guides on this site. Each of those pages carries its own source ledger with primary citations and its own checked date. The states named above, and what each was used for here, are set out below. All state pages checked 7 August 2026.