Tennessee Cottage Food: No Sales Cap, and You May Ship and Wholesale

The governing law is the Tennessee Food Freedom Act, 2022 Public Chapter 862 (Senate Bill 693), passed March 28, 2022 and effective July 1, 2022, codified at T.C.A. § 53-1-118 with supporting definitions added to § 53-1-102. A "homemade food item" is a food item, including a non-alcoholic beverage, which is produced and, if packaged, packaged at the private residence of the producer, and "produce" is defined broadly as preparing a food item by cooking, baking, drying, mixing, cutting, fermenting, preserving, dehydrating, growing, raising, or other process. The section has been amended once, by 2025 Public Chapter 431, and the Tennessee Code current through the 2026 Regular Session carries the same text.

There is no cottage food permit in Tennessee because there is no license to be exempted from. Section 53-1-118(a) exempts the production and sale of homemade food items from all licensing, permitting, inspecting, packaging and labeling laws of the state, and the 2022 act rewrote the license requirement itself: § 53-1-204(a)(1) now opens "Except as provided in § 53-1-118, a person shall not manufacture, process, pack, or hold food for introduction into commerce unless the person holds a valid license issued by the commissioner." The Tennessee Department of Agriculture states on its Food Freedom Act page that it issues no permits or licenses and conducts no inspections for products made under this law.

Tennessee did once cap home food sales, and the dead figure is still quoted at people. Department of Agriculture rule chapter 0080-04-11, Regulations for Establishments Utilizing Domestic Kitchen Facilities for Bakery and Other Non-Potentially Hazardous Foods Intended for Sale, was filed September 29, 2006 and took effect January 27, 2007. It limited a domestic kitchen to 100 units of sale per week, required a Regulatory Services Permit from the Regulatory Services Food and Dairy Section under § 53-1-208, required the operator to complete the University of Tennessee Food Safety Certification Course, confined the trade to jam, jellies, candy and baked goods, and banned pets from the dwelling housing the kitchen. All eight rules in that chapter, .01 through .08, were repealed: the repeal was filed October 17, 2017 and took effect January 15, 2018, more than four years before the Food Freedom Act. Nothing replaced the 100-unit cap. Anyone checking should note that the Secretary of State's undated copy of the chapter still serves the 2007 text, while the effective-rules index links only the January 15, 2018 edition, in which every rule reads REPEALED. Today Tennessee sets no revenue ceiling, no unit ceiling, no employee limit and no annual registration for homemade food.

The sales channels are where Tennessee is genuinely unusual. For non-time/temperature control for safety items, which is the shelf-stable category most cottage food operations live in, § 53-1-118(b)(1) allows a sale by the producer to the consumer in person or remotely, expressly including by telephone or internet, and also a sale by an agent of the producer or a third-party vendor such as a retail shop or grocery store. Subdivision (b)(2) allows delivery by the producer, an agent, a third-party vendor or a third-party carrier. Wholesaling your jam into a Tennessee grocery and shipping an order by common carrier are both lawful, and most states' cottage food statutes forbid one or both. The single geographic limit is § 53-1-118(c)(5): the section does not apply to sales other than intrastate sales made within this state, so an order crossing a state line falls back under federal and receiving-state law.

Which of your products qualify turns on a definition that lives in a rule, not the statute. Section 53-1-102 defines "non-time/temperature control for safety food" as food that does not require time or temperature control for safety to limit the rapid and progressive growth of infectious or toxigenic microorganisms, including categories of foods in Rules of the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, Rule 0080-04-09-.01(116). In the December 26, 2024 edition of that chapter, Retail Food Store Sanitation, the time/temperature control for safety food definition sits at 0080-04-09-.01(117), and subdivision (116) now defines a temporary food establishment instead. The definition sorts foods by the interaction of water activity and pH using Tables A and B, marks the borderline cells Product Assessment Required, and expressly excludes from the controlled category an air-cooled hard-boiled egg with the shell intact and a food in an unopened hermetically sealed container commercially processed to commercial sterility for non-refrigerated storage and distribution.

Labeling is the only paperwork that survives the exemption, and its subdivision numbers moved in 2025. Sections 1 through 3 of 2025 Public Chapter 431 renumbered the old (b)(3) and (b)(4) to (b)(4) and (b)(5), so a Tennessee label guide written before July 1, 2025 points at subdivisions that have shifted. Under the current § 53-1-118(b)(5)(A) the required information goes on a label affixed to the package if the item is packaged, on a label affixed to the container if it is sold from bulk, on a placard displayed at the point of sale if it is neither, or on the webpage if the item is offered for sale only on the internet. Subdivision (b)(5)(B) relaxes this for telephone and custom orders: the seller need not display the information, but must tell the consumer the item was produced at a private residence exempt from state licensing and inspection and may contain allergens, and must keep the producer, product name and ingredient details readily available and provide them on request. Section 53-1-118(d) preempts counties, municipalities and other political jurisdictions from prohibiting and regulating this trade, while § 53-1-118(c)(4) leaves every applicable tax obligation in place.

Because the Food Freedom Act works by exemption rather than by permit, there is no Tennessee cottage food license to suspend and no routine inspection to fail. The real risk is falling outside the conditions in subsection (b), because the exemption in subsection (a) then simply does not apply and ordinary food law returns. At that point § 53-1-204(a)(1) requires a license from the commissioner of agriculture, which under § 53-1-204(a)(2)(B) may issue only on payment of the fee and an inspection of the applicant's facility showing compliance, expires annually, and under § 53-1-204(c) is available only to a United States citizen or a qualified alien as defined in § 4-58-102.

Selling, delivering, holding or offering for sale an article in violation of § 53-1-204 is a prohibited act under § 53-1-103(a)(4), and § 53-1-103(b)(1) makes a violation of that subsection a Class C misdemeanor. Separately, § 53-1-118(a) carves the Department of Health's investigation of a reported foodborne illness out of the exemption, so a home kitchen tied to an outbreak can be investigated whatever its exempt status. The Department of Agriculture is not a fallback: it issues no permit, runs no inspection and gives no product-specific ruling under this law, so a producer with a borderline product has no agency determination to rely on.

Local government cannot fill the gap either, since § 53-1-118(d) preempts county and municipal regulation of the production and sale of homemade food items, though residential zoning, fire and building rules on running a business from a home come from other law that the act does not touch.