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Compliance · 27 min read

Michigan Cottage Food Law: The $50K Cap, the $75K Custom-Cake Bonus, and What the 2024 Amendment Changed

Michigan is the only cottage food state in the country that gives custom-cake decorators a higher revenue cap than everyone else. The standard cap is $50,000. Items priced at $250 or more per unit count against a separate $75,000 cap. Public Act 376 of 2024 — signed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer in late 2024 — also opened third-party delivery and put the caps on an inflation-adjustment schedule that starts October 2026. This guide walks three composite Michigan bakers through how the two-cap math actually works, the food list and the acidified-foods exclusion, the in-state-only restriction, the label rules, and the optional MSU Product Center address-privacy registration.

A three-tier white wedding cake decorated with a cascade of fresh white roses and eucalyptus leaves on a wooden cake stand, set on a draped tablecloth with a champagne flute and small glass tea-light holders against a warm terracotta wall

If you have been hunting for what the Michigan cottage food cap actually is, you have probably ended up frustrated by now. Half the state-law summary sites still list a $25,000 cap. A few have caught up to $50,000. Almost none mention the $75,000 number that quietly sits next to it. And if your work is wedding cakes, tiered birthday cakes, or any other custom-decorated baking where a single item routinely runs $300 or $400, that second number is the one that decides whether you have to leave your home kitchen this year — or whether you have an entire other $25,000 of headroom that nobody told you about.

You are not bad at research. The Michigan rule changed in late 2024, the change was unusual enough that none of the standard reference sites had a template for it, and the agency page leads with the $50,000 headline number that applies to most cottage food work. The $75,000 cake-decorator number is sitting one paragraph down, and unless you knew to look for it you would not notice it. This guide is the longer answer — who qualifies for which cap, how the two-bucket math actually works, where the rule still draws hard lines (acidified foods, interstate shipping, the food list), and what the October 2026 inflation adjustment will do to both numbers.

The short version: Michigan's cottage food framework lives in the Michigan Food Law of 2000, substantially amended by Public Act 376 of 2024. There is no state license, no registration, no fee, no inspection, and no food handler course required to operate. Two revenue caps apply: $50,000 in gross annual sales for cottage food items priced under $250 per unit, and a separate $75,000 cap for items priced at $250 or more per unit — the unique provision that gives custom-cake decorators meaningful headroom. Permitted venues include in-person direct sales, farmers markets, online sales delivered to in-state addresses, in-state mail, and third-party delivery platforms (added by PA 376). The food list is non-potentially-hazardous baked goods, jams and jellies, candy, dry herbs and seasonings, popcorn, and similar shelf-stable categories; acidified foods (hot sauce, salsa, pickles), fermented foods, and refrigerated baked goods (cheesecakes, cream-filled pastries) are excluded. Interstate shipping is not authorized. Both caps are indexed to inflation, with the first adjustment scheduled for October 2026.

The Michigan provision no other state has

Forty-nine states and the District of Columbia have cottage food laws. Some have no revenue cap at all (Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Alabama, Arkansas, and others). Some have flat caps that scale from very low — $5,000 in Wisconsin shelf-stable, $25,000 in Alaska — up through the highest-cap state of Florida at $250,000. Some, like California, run two parallel tiers with different inspection requirements at each tier. None of them — until Michigan amended its law in 2024 — split the cap by the per-unit price of the products being sold.

The Michigan provision is genuinely unusual. The logic behind it is straightforward enough once you see it spelled out: a baker making $8 cookies and one making $480 wedding cakes are doing very different volumes of physical work to hit the same revenue number. A $50,000 cookie business is a real production operation moving thousands of dozens of cookies a year. A $50,000 wedding-cake business is roughly one cake a week. The $250-and-up tier exists because the legislature recognized that high-per-unit, low-volume custom work is structurally different from high-volume packaged-goods work, and that capping a wedding-cake decorator at the same revenue number as a cookie baker effectively penalizes the more time-intensive craft.

The structural consequence: if you are a cake decorator in Michigan, you have more cottage food headroom than a cake decorator anywhere else in the country. The rest of this guide spells out what that means in practice, what the rule still requires, and how to read the parts that almost every third-party summary site still gets wrong.

Three Michigan bakers, three different cap stories

The cleanest way to see how the two-cap structure actually works is to walk through three composite Michigan producers whose books fall in different parts of the rule.

Case 1: Maya, the everyday-cake baker in Lansing

Maya bakes birthday cakes, retirement cakes, and small custom orders out of her home kitchen in Lansing. Her typical cake is a single-tier, decorated round in the $65 to $110 range. She does roughly 350 cakes a year. Her per-cake average is $82. Her gross annual cottage food sales are about $28,700.

Maya is comfortably under the $50,000 standard cap, and the $75,000 tier is irrelevant to her work — none of her items hit the $250 threshold. The Michigan cap is not currently her constraint at all. The constraint that actually shapes Maya's year is her oven schedule. She has one home oven, weekend mornings are her highest-demand window, and the rate at which she can decorate cakes after baking caps her at roughly seven to nine cakes per weekend. To grow revenue meaningfully, she would have to either raise prices, add weekday capacity (which her day job does not allow), or move to a setup with more oven capacity.

For Maya, the question the cottage food rule answers is "what about a year where I get unusually busy and start to push toward $45,000?" The answer is reassuring: she still has $5,000 of headroom under the standard cap before she has to do anything different. The other thing the rule answers is whether she could take on an occasional wedding cake at $300+ without it eating into her cookie-and-birthday-cake budget. The answer is no, it would not eat into it — that one wedding cake at $320 would count against the separate $75,000 bucket and would not touch her standard-cap balance at all.

Maya's "this week" action: confirm that her sales tracking can categorize each sale as either "under $250" or "$250 and up." Most invoicing software cannot do this natively — but a single column in a spreadsheet (or a single field in inventory software like Ardent Seller) tagging each sale as Tier A or Tier B is enough. She does not need it yet at her current volume, but the moment a wedding-cake inquiry lands, she will already have the tracking in place.

Case 2: Priya, the wedding-cake decorator in Ann Arbor

Priya runs a custom wedding-cake practice out of a kitchen she built out at home in Ann Arbor. Her work is almost entirely large tiered cakes for weddings, anniversaries, and milestone events. Her average cake — three or four tiers, sugar flowers, custom flavor pairings — sells for between $380 and $620. She delivers and assembles about 95 cakes a year. Her per-cake average is $465. Her gross annual cottage food sales are approximately $44,200.

Every single one of Priya's cakes is over the $250 unit-price threshold. Every dollar she makes counts against the $75,000 cap — not the $50,000 cap. She is operating with $30,800 of remaining headroom under the bonus cap, which is approximately sixty-six additional cakes at her current average price. The $50,000 standard cap is structurally untouched: she has not sold a single item under $250, so her standard-cap balance is $0 used / $50,000 available.

For Priya, this is the difference between needing to incorporate, lease a commercial kitchen, and apply for a Michigan food processing establishment license — or not. Under the pre-2024 framework, with a single $25,000 cap, she would have been forced into commercial production years ago. Under the standard $50,000 cap alone, she would be brushing the ceiling now. Under the $75,000 cake-decorator provision, she has comfortable room to grow her cake count by another twenty-five percent before the rule itself becomes the binding constraint.

She also has a choice nobody else really has: she could take on a complementary cookie or favor business — wedding-day welcome cookies, gift boxes of decorated cookies for guests — using her separate, fully untouched, $50,000 standard cap. The two caps stack. The $44,200 of wedding cakes plus a hypothetical $18,000 of decorated wedding favors would be $62,200 total — which would have looked like a violation under the old single-cap rule, but is comfortably within the framework under the post-PA-376 structure.

Priya's "this week" action: check that her invoicing system separately tracks her two product lines if she has more than one. The two-cap framework is generous, but it depends on her being able to demonstrate at audit which sales counted against which bucket. A clean accounting separation between "wedding-cake line" and any other product line is the bookkeeping prerequisite to using both caps in the same year.

Case 3: David, the mixed-shop baker in Traverse City

David runs a home-baked goods practice in Traverse City that genuinely spans the two tiers. He sells decorated cookie boxes at $24 to $48, sourdough loaves at $12, custom birthday cakes at $85 to $180, and a smaller line of large special-occasion cakes (graduation, anniversary, three-tier birthday) at $260 to $390. His annual production is roughly $32,000 in cookies, breads, and standard cakes, plus another $18,500 in items at $260+. His total cottage food revenue is approximately $50,500.

If you read his number against the headline cap of $50,000, it would look like David has already crossed the line. He has not. Under the two-cap framework:

  • $32,000 of cookie, bread, and under-$250-cake sales counts against the $50,000 standard cap. He has $18,000 of remaining headroom there.
  • $18,500 of $260+ special-occasion-cake sales counts against the separate $75,000 bonus cap. He has $56,500 of remaining headroom there.

His total available room under the cottage food framework, in other words, is about $74,500 — not $0. He is operating at roughly two-thirds capacity inside the rule, not at the ceiling.

The tracking discipline this requires is real. David has to be able to defend, at audit, which sales counted against which bucket. The defense is straightforward — every invoice line carries a unit price, and the unit price is the per-item sale price actually paid by the customer — but it does mean that his books need to be able to slice his sales by unit price, not just by total revenue. The single most common mistake under the two-cap framework is producers who track only gross revenue and then can't answer the question "of your $50,500 in sales, how much was at $250-per-unit-or-above?"

David's "this week" action: add a unit-price column to his sales spreadsheet (or a per-sale tag in his inventory software) and back-fill it for the year-to-date. The work is one focused afternoon, and once it is done, the two-cap math is a single SUMIF formula away.

What the three vignettes tell us

The structural insight is that Michigan's two-cap framework is not really one cap that bakers have to stay under. It is two separate budgets, with different reasonable use cases, that the same producer can use simultaneously. The constraint matters most for the producer in the middle — David — and matters in different ways at the extremes.

A baker doing exclusively low-per-unit work (Maya) operates against a $50,000 standard cap with no access to the bonus tier and no real benefit from PA 376 — though the cap raise from $25,000 to $50,000 did just double her runway compared to the pre-2024 rule. A baker doing exclusively high-per-unit custom work (Priya) operates against a $75,000 bonus cap with the standard cap entirely unused — for her, PA 376 was the bill that kept her in the cottage food framework. A baker straddling the two tiers (David) has access to both caps and a combined budget of $125,000 if every category were maxed out — but in practice his actual ceiling is what his oven and his hours allow, not what the rule allows.

The framework, in other words, rewards bakers who think of their business as two product lines with two budgets — not as one number against one ceiling. The accounting setup that supports that thinking is genuinely simple. The tracking discipline matters.

What the Michigan statute actually says

The cottage food framework is woven into the Michigan Food Law of 2000, which is the umbrella statute that governs food processing in Michigan. The cottage food provisions sit alongside (and are exempted from) the broader food processing establishment licensing regime.

The sections a producer should be able to point at:

  • MCL 289.1109 — the definition of "cottage food operation." A natural person, operating from a private home, producing only non-potentially-hazardous foods, and selling directly to the consumer.
  • MCL 289.4102 — the operational rule. The revenue caps, the venue authority, the label requirements, the food category exclusions.
  • Public Act 376 of 2024 — the amendment, signed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer in late 2024, that raised the cap from $25,000 to $50,000, created the separate $75,000 cap for items priced at $250 or more per unit, explicitly authorized third-party delivery, and indexed both caps to inflation with the first adjustment scheduled for October 2026.

For program-level guidance, the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development cottage food page is the authoritative agency source. It is updated by MDARD's Food and Dairy Division and reflects the post-PA-376 framework. Older versions of the page (which the Wayback Machine still archives) describe the pre-2024 $25,000 cap and do not mention the $250-per-unit bonus; anyone relying on a cached or printed copy from before 2025 is reading a stale rule.

What MCL 289.4102 does not require, despite what some out-of-date third-party summaries still claim, is a state registration, an application, a fee, an annual renewal, a pre-operational kitchen inspection, or a food handler course. Michigan's cottage food framework is — at the front door — among the lightest in the country. The constraints come from the food list, the venues, and the in-state-only rule, not from licensing paperwork.

What you can make under Michigan cottage food

Michigan's framework, like most cottage food states, restricts production to non-potentially-hazardous foods — items that are shelf-stable at room temperature and do not require temperature control for safety. The MDARD program page enumerates the categories explicitly. The ones most home bakers ask about:

  • Breads, rolls, biscuits, muffins, scones, and other yeasted or chemically-leavened baked goods that do not require refrigeration.
  • Cookies, brownies, bars, and similar drop or pan baked goods.
  • Cakes (frosted or unfrosted) where the frosting itself is non-potentially-hazardous — buttercream made from butter, powdered sugar, and shelf-stable flavorings qualifies; cream cheese frosting and whipped cream do not.
  • Fondant, gum paste, and other sugar-based decorating media.
  • Jams, jellies, preserves, fruit butters, and naturally-acidic fruit-based spreads.
  • Hard candy, fudge, brittle, toffee, taffy, caramels, and other confections.
  • Dry herbs, spices, seasoning blends, dry rubs, and dry baking mixes.
  • Roasted coffee beans and dry tea blends.
  • Granola, popcorn, popcorn balls, cereals, trail mixes, and dried fruits.
  • Vinegars and flavored vinegars where the vinegar itself supplies the acidification.

What you cannot make under Michigan cottage food

The exclusions are the same broad lines drawn in most cottage food states. None of these qualify for the home-kitchen exemption regardless of which cap a producer is operating under:

  • Acidified foods — hot sauce, salsa, pickled vegetables, BBQ sauce, mustards and condiments where the acidification is added by the producer rather than naturally present. These require a Michigan-licensed food processing establishment, plus FDA acidified-foods process authority review if the product moves in interstate commerce.
  • Fermented foods — sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, fermented hot sauce, kvass, water kefir, and other ferments.
  • Low-acid canned foods — canned vegetables, canned soups, canned broths, low-acid sauces.
  • Refrigerated baked goods — cheesecakes, cream pies, custard pies, custard-filled pastries, eclairs, cream puffs, tres leches cakes, mousse cakes, and any baked good that requires refrigeration to be safe.
  • Cream-cheese-frosted cakes, whipped-cream-frosted cakes, and ganache-coated cakes that require refrigeration.
  • Meat, poultry, fish, and seafood products — jerky, smoked or cured meats, fish dips, seafood salads, charcuterie, pâtés.
  • Fresh dairy products — milk, cream, butter, cheese, yogurt, ice cream, gelato.
  • Fresh juices, fresh-pressed cider, fresh-cut produce, sprouts.
  • Pet treats and pet food — regulated separately under the Michigan commercial feed law.
  • Alcoholic beverages — beer, wine, mead, cider, distilled spirits.
  • Cannabis-, hemp-, or CBD-containing foods — separately regulated under the Michigan Regulation and Taxation of Marihuana Act and federal hemp rules.

A producer who wants to make any of these for sale needs either a Michigan-licensed food processing establishment (administered by MDARD under separate provisions of the Michigan Food Law of 2000), or — for cottage-style work that crosses into refrigerated baked goods — a fully commercial kitchen environment that complies with state and federal food safety requirements on top.

Where you can sell

Public Act 376 of 2024 broadened the venue list materially. Michigan cottage food sales are authorized in the following channels, provided the sale is delivered to a Michigan address:

  • Direct in-person sales from the producer's home or any agreed in-person handoff location.
  • Farmers markets — including certified producer markets and seasonal community markets.
  • Roadside stands and farm stands.
  • Public events, festivals, and craft fairs at which the producer is selling directly to the consumer.
  • Online sales with delivery to Michigan addresses. The producer can take orders through their own website, Etsy, Square Online, Shopify, or any other e-commerce platform, but the delivery must land in Michigan.
  • In-state mail order — shipping by USPS, UPS, FedEx, or other carrier to a Michigan address.
  • Third-party delivery platforms — DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Instacart, and similar food delivery services, authorized explicitly by PA 376. The producer remains responsible for compliance with labeling, food safety, and the cap structure; the platform is the delivery mechanism, not the regulated seller.

What is not authorized: sales to grocery stores, restaurants, cafes, hotels, or any other retail food establishment for resale (no wholesale path), consignment placement in third-party retail, and any sale delivered out of state. Michigan is not in the Pennsylvania or Ohio category of cottage food states that authorize wholesale to retail establishments; the cottage food framework is direct-to-consumer-only.

What goes on a Michigan cottage food label

MCL 289.4102 and the MDARD program guidance require six elements on every cottage food product label:

  1. The name of the cottage food operation — the legal name of the producer or the registered business name.
  2. The address where the food was produced — the residential address of the home kitchen. The MSU Product Center identification number (see next section) may be used in lieu of the address for producers who do not want their home address on labels.
  3. The product name — the common name of the food.
  4. A complete ingredient list in descending order by predominance by weight. Compound ingredients (premade frostings, premixed seasonings) should be listed with their sub-ingredients in parentheses.
  5. The net weight or net volume of the product.
  6. An allergen statement — a "Contains:" line listing any of the nine major allergens recognized under federal FALCPA and the FASTER Act of 2021: milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame.
  7. The statutory disclaimer in at least 11-point type: "Made in a home kitchen that has not been inspected by the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development." The wording is set by MDARD and may not be paraphrased. The disclaimer must be on the package, not on a separate card or insert.

For products sold without packaging (a cake delivered on a board, for example), the same information must be provided to the customer on an invoice, receipt, or accompanying card before or at the time of sale. For online sales, the same information must be displayed on the product listing page.

The MSU Product Center address-privacy option

Michigan does not have its own state-issued ID number program for cottage food labeling — but the MSU Product Center for Food and Agriculture Business Development at Michigan State University does. Producers who do not want their residential address printed on labels sitting on a customer's countertop (or on a farmers-market price tag) can register with the Product Center, receive an identification number, and use that number on the label in place of the address.

The mechanics:

  • Registration is free and is done through the Product Center's online intake form.
  • The producer's actual address is held by the Product Center, not displayed on the label.
  • A small symbol (typically the Product Center initials and the assigned number) is what the label displays.
  • The Product Center provides one-on-one business counseling on top, which is a separately useful resource for new cottage food operators.

The option is purely a privacy convenience. It does not authorize anything that is not already authorized under MCL 289.4102, it is not a license, and producers who do not mind their home address appearing on labels are not required to register. For producers who plan to sell through farmers markets in densely populated counties — or through online channels where the label sits in a customer's home — the address-substitution can be worth the ten minutes of registration time.

What October 2026 changes: the inflation adjustment

The structural change PA 376 of 2024 made that gets the least attention is the inflation indexing. Both the $50,000 standard cap and the $75,000 bonus cap are now adjusted annually for inflation, with the first adjustment scheduled to take effect October 2026.

The mechanics are administered by MDARD, which uses the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) to compute the adjustment. The expected pattern: each October, MDARD publishes the adjusted cap figures for the following twelve months, rounded to a convenient figure (typically the nearest $500 or $1,000). The expectation in most state cottage food inflation-indexing schemes is that the annual adjustment runs about $1,500 to $3,000 on a $50,000 base in a typical inflation year — meaningful enough that a producer brushing the cap should check the new figure before assuming the prior year's number is still in force.

What the indexing does not do: it does not change the $250 per-unit threshold for the bonus cap, which is set in the statute as a flat dollar figure. The legislature explicitly chose to index only the revenue caps, not the per-unit threshold. A producer doing wedding-cake work above $250 in 2026 will still be doing wedding-cake work above the same $250 in 2032, even though the revenue caps will have drifted upward in real terms.

What the indexing also does not do: it does not retroactively change prior-year totals. A producer who hit the cap in calendar year 2026 cannot retroactively benefit from the October 2026 adjustment if their 2026 totals were already booked against the pre-adjustment figure. The adjustment applies forward.

Where Michigan sits in the cottage food map

For producers comparing Michigan against neighboring or peer states, the table below sets the post-PA-376 Michigan framework against the most-discussed cottage food regimes elsewhere in the country.

Dimension Michigan (post-PA 376) Ohio Pennsylvania Illinois Texas California (Class B) Florida
Standard revenue cap $50,000 None None None $150,000 $150,000 $250,000
Per-unit bonus tier $75,000 for $250+ items n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a
Inflation-indexed Yes (starting Oct 2026) n/a n/a n/a No No No
State registration None None $35 LFE registration $50 local registration Food handler course County Class B registration None
Kitchen inspection None None Yes (initial + annual) None None Yes (Class B only) None
Acidified foods Excluded Excluded Permitted (pH testing) Permitted (recipe approval) Limited Excluded Excluded
Wholesale to retailers Excluded Permitted Permitted Excluded Limited vendor path Class B only Excluded
Interstate shipping Excluded Excluded Permitted Excluded Excluded Excluded Excluded
Third-party delivery platforms Explicit authorization Not addressed Not addressed Not addressed Not addressed Not addressed Not addressed

Two things stand out in the Michigan column.

First, Michigan is the only state with a per-unit price tier. No other cottage food state in the country adjusts its revenue cap based on the price of the items being sold. The $75,000 bonus for $250+ items is genuinely unique. For custom-cake decorators, this is the most generous cottage food provision in the country.

Second, Michigan is one of the first states to explicitly authorize third-party delivery. Other states' cottage food rules are silent on platforms like DoorDash and Uber Eats — producers in those states operate in a gray zone, technically authorized to sell direct but with no clear answer on whether using a delivery platform counts as direct. PA 376 settled the Michigan question explicitly: the producer remains the regulated seller, the platform is the delivery mechanism, and the sale qualifies as cottage food if the producer is otherwise in compliance.

The trade-offs that come with both: Michigan does not authorize wholesale to retailers (Pennsylvania and Ohio do), does not authorize acidified foods (Pennsylvania does with pH testing), and does not authorize interstate sales (Pennsylvania does, with the federal layer applying on top). The $50K / $75K caps are real ceilings — well below Texas, California, and Florida — and producers approaching them need to plan the transition to a licensed food processing establishment before they cross.

What to do this week

The producers most affected by Public Act 376 are not the ones at the extremes — Maya at $28,700 has nothing to change, and a producer already at $120,000 is operating outside the cottage food framework regardless. The producers who should re-read their setup are the ones who built their business under the pre-2024 $25,000 cap and assumed the cottage food door had already closed.

If you stopped taking cottage food orders in 2022 or 2023 because your revenue projection said you were going to hit $25,000 within the year, you may have made a decision that the current law no longer requires. The $50,000 standard cap doubles the prior runway, and if your work is custom-cake-heavy, the $75,000 bonus cap adds another $25,000 on top of that. A practice that looked like it was at the cottage food ceiling under the old rule may have meaningful room under the new one.

The producers who should set up a tracking discipline now are the ones whose books straddle the two tiers. Most invoicing software treats sales as a single revenue stream. The two-cap framework requires a per-sale tag — "Tier A" for under $250 per unit, "Tier B" for $250 and up — so the year-end answer to "how much of your sales counted against which bucket?" is one filter away rather than one afternoon of forensic line-by-line review. Inventory software built for makers — like Ardent Seller's bakery and cottage food tracking — can handle the tag at the sale line, but a single column in a spreadsheet works just as well at the volumes most Michigan cottage food operations are running.

The producers who should plan for the October 2026 adjustment are the ones currently within $5,000 of either cap. The first inflation adjustment lands in October, and the new annual cap figures take effect immediately. A producer at $48,000 in mid-2026 should check the MDARD page in October to see the adjusted figure before booking the remainder of the year.

  • Custom Cake Pricing for Cottage Bakers — three baker scenarios on tiered cakes, test bakes, and rush jobs. Pairs directly with the Michigan $250 per-unit bonus framing for cake decorators.
  • Cottage Baker Glossary — the 32-term vocabulary every cottage food operator should know, organized by the four "rooms" of the business (kitchen, regulator, books, platform).
  • Batch Tracking for Food Sellers — the lot-tracking spine that makes a recall a forty-pint problem instead of a four-hundred-pint problem. Worth setting up before crossing into the $75K tier.

Free resources

A few free downloads from the Ardent Workshop library that pair well with this post:

  • Cottage Food Laws by State: The 50-State + DC Quick Reference — the PDF this blog series feeds. Includes the updated Michigan two-cap entry and the comparison framework against forty-nine other states.
  • Cottage Food Revenue Cap Tracker — the interactive tool that calculates your remaining cap headroom under any state's rule. Handles Michigan's two-cap structure by tier.
  • Home Bakers Order & Delivery Tracker — the workbook that walks each custom-cake order through ingredients, decoration time, delivery cost, and per-order margin. Especially relevant for producers using the $75K bonus tier where each unit's pricing is the load-bearing number.

Sources & methodology

Michigan statute, regulation, and agency guidance:

Comparison-state references:

Federal:

Note on data freshness: This guide reflects the Michigan Food Law of 2000 as amended through Public Act 376 of 2024, and MDARD guidance as of May 2026. The first inflation adjustment under PA 376 is scheduled for October 2026; producers should check the MDARD program page after that date for the adjusted cap figures. Producer scenarios in this guide are illustrative composites — Maya, Priya, and David are not real businesses. Third-party state-law summary websites — including Forrager, Cottage CMS, and others — were consulted as cross-references but, where they conflict with the statute as amended, the statute controls. Several of those sources currently describe Michigan with the pre-2024 $25,000 cap or do not mention the $75,000 bonus tier; those characterizations are stale.

This article is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, regulatory, food-safety, or tax advice. Michigan cottage food law — the two-cap structure, food categories, label rules, venue authority, third-party delivery rules, in-state-only sales rules, the inflation-adjustment schedule, and federal interstate-commerce rules — varies by jurisdiction and product and changes with new legislation or departmental guidance. Consult the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Michigan Department of Treasury, your municipal zoning office, a qualified food regulatory consultant, or an attorney before making compliance, financial, or production decisions based on this content.

Frequently asked questions

Two caps, not one. Under the Michigan Food Law of 2000 as amended by Public Act 376 of 2024, the standard cottage food revenue cap is $50,000 in gross annual sales of cottage food products. A separate $75,000 cap applies to cottage food items priced at $250 or more per unit — the structure was added specifically to give custom-cake decorators, large catering platters, and other high-per-unit bakers more revenue headroom than someone selling $5 cookies. A producer who sells both can use both caps in the same year, but the math is two separate buckets: cookies under $250 each count toward the $50K bucket, items at $250+ count toward the $75K bucket. Public Act 376 also indexed both caps to inflation, with the first adjustment scheduled for October 2026.

The Michigan statute, as amended by PA 376 of 2024, separates cottage food sales into two unit-price tiers. Items priced at less than $250 each count against the $50,000 standard cap. Items priced at $250 or more per unit count against a separate $75,000 cap. The $250 threshold is per individual sale unit — a single five-tier wedding cake at $450 is one $450 item, not nine $50 servings. A custom decorated birthday cake priced at $180 is below the threshold and counts against the standard cap; a $320 wedding cake is above the threshold and counts against the bonus cap. A producer whose entire book of work is wedding cakes at $400+ each can do $75,000 a year of cottage food sales without any state license. A producer with a mixed book has to track which sales count where.

No. Michigan does not require state registration, a permit, an application, a fee, a kitchen inspection, or a food handler course to operate as a cottage food operation. The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) administers the framework but does not issue cottage food licenses. The only optional state-adjacent registration is with the MSU Product Center, which issues an identification number that producers may use on labels in place of their home address. This is purely an address-privacy convenience — it does not authorize anything that is not already authorized, and producers who do not mind their home address appearing on labels do not need it.

Yes to online, no to interstate. Michigan cottage food operations may sell directly to consumers in person, at farmers markets, online, by in-state mail, and through third-party delivery (food delivery platforms, courier services) — the third-party delivery channel was specifically added by Public Act 376 of 2024. Online and mail sales must be delivered to a Michigan address. Shipping a box of cookies from Grand Rapids to a customer in Toledo crosses a state line and moves the sale into federal FDA jurisdiction, which does not recognize state cottage food exemptions. Producers who want to ship out of state need to upgrade to a fully licensed food processing facility, with FDA Food Facility Registration on top.

No. The Michigan cottage food framework excludes acidified foods (hot sauce, salsa, pickled vegetables, BBQ sauce), low-acid canned foods (canned vegetables, soups, broths), fermented foods (sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha), and all potentially hazardous foods (cream-filled or custard-filled baked goods, cheesecakes, meat and poultry products, fresh dairy products). These categories require either a Michigan-licensed food processing establishment — administered by MDARD under separate provisions of the Michigan Food Law of 2000 — or for acidified foods specifically, an FDA scheduled-process review on top if the product moves in interstate commerce. The line is the same one drawn in most cottage food states; what is unusual about Michigan is what the cap looks like on the products that do qualify, not what qualifies.

Six elements. The name of the cottage food operation. The address where the food was produced — or the MSU Product Center identification number, if the producer has registered for one and prefers not to display a residential address. The product name and a complete ingredient list in descending order by weight, with sub-ingredients in parentheses for compound ingredients. The net weight or volume. A "Contains:" allergen statement covering any of the nine major allergens recognized under federal FALCPA and the FASTER Act (milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, sesame). And the statutory disclaimer in at least 11-point type: "Made in a home kitchen that has not been inspected by the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development." The disclaimer wording is set by MDARD and may not be paraphrased.

Three substantive changes plus one structural one. First, the gross sales cap on cottage food products was raised from the prior $25,000 figure to $50,000. Second, a separate $75,000 cap was created for cottage food items priced at $250 or more per unit — the unique custom-cake provision that distinguishes Michigan from every other cottage food state. Third, the sales channel list was broadened to explicitly include third-party delivery (delivery platforms and courier services), which the prior framework did not address. The structural change: both caps are now indexed to inflation, with the first adjustment scheduled for October 2026 and annual adjustments thereafter, so the $50K and $75K numbers will drift upward over time without further legislative action.

By the price actually paid by the customer for the unit. The $250 threshold is a sale-price threshold, not a cost threshold, not a wholesale-price threshold, and not a per-serving threshold. A five-tier wedding cake that costs the baker $85 in ingredients and sells for $450 is a $450 unit that counts against the $75,000 cap. A six-dozen-cookie order that costs $320 in total — with each individual cookie priced at roughly $4.45 — is seventy-two individual $4.45 units, not one $320 unit, and the whole sale counts against the $50,000 standard cap. The tier division is per individual cake, pie, large pastry, or other discrete item sold as one unit to one customer. Producers selling assortments or platters should keep clear records of how each line on the invoice was priced — and if a custom contract sells one item but lists the price per slice, the contract should make explicit that the sale unit is the cake, not the slice.