Kansas Cottage Food: No License, No Sales Cap, but 13 Banned Processes

The Kansas exemption is written as a licensing carve-out rather than as a cottage food program, which is why it has no application form, no registration number, no inspection and no dollar cap. K.S.A. 65-689(a) makes it unlawful to conduct a food establishment or food processing plant without a license from the secretary of agriculture, and subsection (d)(4) removes from that duty a person who produces food for distribution directly to the end consumer, if such food does not require time and temperature control for safety or specialized processing, as determined by the secretary. Three conditions are doing the work: direct to the end consumer, no time and temperature control, and no specialized processing. Selling through a shop, a distributor or any resale channel breaks the first condition and puts the producer straight back under the license requirement.

Specialized processing is not left to guesswork. K.A.R. 4-28-1 defines it as any food preparation method having an increased risk of foodborne illness associated with improper implementation, then lists thirteen. Smoking food as preservation rather than for flavor, curing, canning other than fruit jams, jellies and preserves, using additives or components such as vinegar to preserve or to make a food shelf-stable, reduced-oxygen packaging, sprouting seeds or beans, drying anything other than herbs, whole fruits or whole vegetables, keeping molluscan shellfish in a life-support tank, custom-processing animals for personal use, processing and packaging juice, fermenting, producing cultured dairy such as cheese, yogurt and buttermilk, and using a noncontinuous cooking process. Each of those pushes a Kansas home producer out of the exemption. The canning carve-out is the one that matters most in practice: fruit jams, jellies and preserves are expressly excluded from the ban, so those may be made and sold, while pressure-canned vegetables, salsas and pickles acidified with vinegar are specialized processing and cannot.

Exempt does not mean unregulated. K.A.R. 4-28-33 applies a full sanitation and hygiene code to every food establishment exempted by K.S.A. 65-689. Food contact surfaces must be washed in hot potable water with detergent and sanitized by immersion in a chlorine bleach solution of 50 to 100 parts per million for 10 seconds, then air-dried, or with a sanitizer labeled for food contact surfaces. Bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat food is prohibited. Handwashing is prescribed step by step, including rubbing with soap for at least 10 seconds and drying with a clean paper towel. Animals may not be in food preparation areas. A producer on a private well or spring must have the water tested at least annually to nitrates under 20 milligrams per kilogram and zero colony-forming units of total and fecal coliforms, and must produce the current test on request; a septic system needs approval from KDHE or the county sanitarian. Anyone with vomiting, diarrhea, jaundice, sore throat with fever, an open draining lesion on the hands, or norovirus, hepatitis A, shigella, shiga toxin-producing E. coli or salmonella typhi may not work with food.

Labels still have to comply with the Kansas Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. Under K.S.A. 65-665(e) a food in package form is misbranded unless the label carries the name and place of business of the manufacturer, packer or distributor and an accurate statement of quantity by weight, measure or count, and under subsection (i) it must give the common or usual name of the food and, where it is made from two or more ingredients, the common or usual name of each. Subsection (k) requires a statement where artificial flavoring, artificial coloring or chemical preservatives are present, and subsection (a) makes any false or misleading labeling misbranding on its own. Kansas has adopted the Kansas food code dated October 20, 2022 by reference in K.A.R. 4-28-8, most recently amended June 2, 2023, which supplies the meaning of time and temperature control for safety.

The exemption is conditional, not absolute. A. 65-689(e) provides that an entity exempt under subsection (d) is not exempt from inspection or regulation when a violation is observed or reported to the secretary, so a complaint about a Kansas home baker brings the Department of Agriculture in even though there is no routine inspection. A. 65-682(a) lets the secretary impose a civil penalty of up to $1,000 per violation after notice and an opportunity for a hearing under the Kansas administrative procedure act, with each day of a continuing violation counted separately, and subsection (d) makes a reckless or intentional violation a class A nonperson misdemeanor. R. A. 65-689(a) rather than merely breaching a condition. A. R. 4-28-34(d) confirms an exempt person may apply for a license voluntarily.