Home › State guides › Tennessee
Selling homemade food in Tennessee means your label has to follow the Tennessee Food Freedom Act (TFFA) — homemade food items (current version: Public Chapter No. 431 / SB 484, effective July 1, 2025). Here is exactly what that label must show in 2026 — the required fields, the allergen rule, and the verbatim disclaimer and its font size — sourced to the statute and dated.
Print this statement on the label, word for word:
The TFFA sets NO minimum type size — no point value is claimed. The two-sentence disclaimer must appear word for word.
Tennessee replaced its old cottage-food regime with the Tennessee Food Freedom Act (Public Chapter 431 / SB 484, effective July 1, 2025), which is a pure exemption, not a permit or registration program: a producer of 'homemade food' needs no license, no state inspection, and files nothing with the Department of Agriculture before selling. Its defining trait is scope plus channel — it authorizes direct, in-state sales from a producer to an informed end consumer (home/farm pickup, farmers markets, roadside, and in-state delivery/online), rather than sales through grocery, wholesale, or interstate mail. Inspected-meat rules, alcohol, and other separately regulated products stay outside the exemption, and the consumer must be told the food was made in an uninspected home kitchen. Unlike a classic cottage-food law, food-freedom statutes generally impose no annual gross-sales cap.
The Act covers direct sales to an end consumer inside Tennessee. The moment you mail or ship out of state you leave the exemption and fall under federal FDA jurisdiction. Keep sales in-state (pickup, market, in-state delivery); confirm delivery limits with the Tennessee Department of Agriculture.
Placing product on a grocery/store shelf or selling to restaurants for resale is not the direct-to-consumer channel the Act protects. Those channels require the normal manufactured-food/retail licensing.
Inspected meat and poultry, alcohol, and certain other separately regulated products are not swept in. Do not home-produce and sell items that state or federal law requires to be inspected.
No permit does not mean no label. The buyer must be informed the food is homemade and not produced in an inspected facility. Get the exact required disclosure wording from the TDA guidance before printing labels.
Timeline: Effectively immediate. Because the Act is an exemption with no application, inspection, or registration, you can begin selling as soon as your product is within the allowed scope and your labels carry the required home-kitchen disclosure. Realistic path: read the TDA / UT Extension Food Freedom Act guidance, confirm your item is covered, print compliant labels, and sell the same week.
Cost: $0 — no permit required (pure exemption; no state license, registration, or inspection fee). Your only out-of-pocket cost is label printing/ingredients.
Cottage food laws get revised, and a new disclaimer or font size can quietly make your label non-compliant. Leave your email and we'll write to you only when Tennessee's cottage food label rules change. Nothing else, ever — and you can unsubscribe from any message.
Enter your recipe and get a print-ready label with the exact Tennessee wording, ingredients ordered by weight and allergens auto-declared. Free watermarked preview; clean PDF for $12.
Make my Tennessee label →Tennessee requires this exact statement on a cottage food label: “This product was produced at a private residence that is exempt from state licensing and inspection. This product may contain allergens.” The state sets no minimum point size for it.
No. Tennessee does not require a permit or registration number printed on the label.
At minimum: product name — the common name of the food; your business / producer name; the address of the cottage food operation; a complete ingredient list, in descending order by weight (sub-ingredients included); an allergen declaration — the 9 major FDA allergens, in the ingredient list or a “Contains:” line; net weight, in US customary and metric units; the state's required disclaimer (see below); a telephone number for the operation.
No. CottageCompliance gives general information based on each state's published rules, dated to when we last verified them. Always confirm with your state or local agency before selling.
Source: Tennessee Food Freedom Act — Tenn. Code Ann. §53-1-102 and §53-1-118; Public Chapter No. 431 (SB 484). UT Extension guidance. Verified 2026-08-09. General information, not legal advice — confirm with your state or local agency before selling.