Tennessee Food Freedom Act: A Cottage Food Maker's Guide to America's Most Permissive Home Kitchen Law

In June 2022, the most paperwork a Tennessee home baker had to do was figure out which of two competing home-kitchen frameworks they were operating under: the Department of Agriculture's Domestic Kitchen exemption, which was inspection-light and food-list-narrow, or the Department of Health's home-baking framework, which had a different list and a different set of disclosures. Both were limited to non-TCS shelf-stable foods. Both came with a sales cap. Producers regularly got conflicting answers from the two agencies. Cake decorators complained for years.

In July 2025, the most paperwork a Tennessee home baker has to do is print a label.

That is the actual span of the change. Three years, one repeal-and-replace, one TCS-expansion amendment, and Tennessee went from one of the more confused cottage food jurisdictions in the southeast to the simplest, most permissive home kitchen framework in the country. The remarkable thing is not that it happened — Tennessee has been on a "food freedom" trajectory for a decade — but that the resulting framework is shockingly easy to summarize. No revenue cap. No permit. No inspection. No registration. No training certificate. No annual renewal. One verbatim disclaimer. One in-state-only rule. One in-person-only rule for the new TCS foods. That's it.

If you are a Tennessee baker, jam maker, candymaker, hot-sauce producer, pickler, dairy-product baker, or small-flock poultry producer trying to figure out what you can sell legally from your home — this guide walks through what the law actually says, what HB 130 added in 2025, the rare low-acid canned food allowance that distinguishes Tennessee from every neighboring state, the in-person-only handoff rule that catches every new TCS producer, the federal interstate-shipping line that nobody outsmarts, and the three things online cottage food guides about Tennessee still get wrong.

The short version

What the Tennessee Food Freedom Act actually does: The Act lives at T.C.A. § 53-1-118, originally enacted by Public Chapter 862 (HB 813/SB 693, 2022) and amended by Public Chapter 431 (HB 130) effective July 1, 2025. Foods produced in a home kitchen under the Act are exempt from "all licensing, permitting, inspecting, packaging, and labeling laws of the state." No revenue cap. No registration, no permit, no fee, no inspection. No food handler card. No annual renewal. Allowed foods include nearly every category of shelf-stable home-prepared food — baked goods, candies, condiments, pickles, jams, low-acid canned foods (rare among US states), fermented foods, dry mixes, honey (up to 150 gallons/year), and as of July 1, 2025, TCS items containing pasteurized dairy and small-flock or federally inspected poultry under 9 CFR § 381.10(c) and 9 CFR § 381.10(d). Non-TCS items can be sold direct, at farmers markets, online, by in-state mail, by an agent or employee, at roadside stands, and at wholesale to retail food sales establishments. TCS items must be sold directly by the producer, in person, in Tennessee — no shipping, no wholesale of TCS, no third-party delivery platforms. The label must carry the verbatim disclaimer "This product was produced at a private residence that is exempt from state licensing and inspection. This product may contain allergens." Excluded: unpasteurized milk, alcoholic beverages, fish, shellfish, red meat (with a narrow USDA carve-out), meat byproducts. Out-of-state sales are not authorized.

How Tennessee got here

If you've come to Tennessee cottage food law in 2026, you've inherited a clean framework. The story of how it got clean is worth knowing because it explains why a few online guides about Tennessee still describe a regime that no longer exists.

For roughly a decade, Tennessee operated two parallel home-kitchen frameworks. The first was the Department of Agriculture's "Domestic Kitchen" program at Tenn. Comp. R. & Regs. 0080-04-11, which required a pre-operational inspection and was limited to specific non-TCS food categories. The second was the Department of Health's home-baking framework, which used a different food list and a different disclaimer. Producers had to figure out which agency they were operating under — and the answer wasn't always obvious because some products fit one program and not the other. Cottage bakers spent more time on phone calls than on baking.

HB 813 (sponsored by Rep. Lafferty, with SB 693 by Sen. Niceley in the Senate) was filed in the 2022 session as a clean-slate replacement. The bill passed both chambers, was signed by Governor Bill Lee, and became Public Chapter 862. Effective July 1, 2022, both prior frameworks were repealed and the new Tennessee Food Freedom Act took their place at T.C.A. § 53-1-118. The new act:

• Eliminated the dual-program problem by creating a single statutory exemption.
• Eliminated the revenue cap entirely.
• Eliminated the kitchen inspection requirement.
• Eliminated the food handler training requirement.
• Authorized wholesale to retail food sales establishments for non-TCS items.
• Established the verbatim disclaimer that remains in force today.

What it did not do — at least not in 2022 — was authorize TCS foods. The 2022 framework was still non-TCS-only. A Tennessee baker could make sourdough but not a quiche. A jam maker could sell preserves but not a cream cheese spread. The framework was permissive on every other dimension, but the TCS exclusion remained.

That changed in 2025. HB 130 (sponsored by Rep. Michele Reneau of Signal Mountain), enacted as Public Chapter 431, took effect July 1, 2025 and amended § 53-1-118 to add a defined set of TCS foods to the allowed list. The expansion was deliberately structured to ride on top of existing federal exemptions rather than create a new state inspection regime: pasteurized dairy is allowed because federal law already governs the pasteurization process; small-flock poultry is allowed because federal law already exempts producers slaughtering fewer than 1,000 birds per year under 9 CFR § 381.10(c); inspected meat and poultry are allowed because federal inspection already attests to wholesomeness.

The result, as of mid-2025, is the framework this guide describes. The legacy Domestic Kitchen program is gone. The legacy DOH home-baking framework is gone. The cap is gone. The two-agency confusion is gone. What's left is one statute, one disclaimer, one set of in-state sales channels, and one structural split between non-TCS (everything goes) and TCS (in-person only).

What you can actually make and sell

The combined effect of the 2022 act and the 2025 amendment is the broadest cottage food list in the country. The categories below come from the Department of Agriculture's published guidance and from the cross-referenced food categories at T.C.A. § 53-1-102.

Shelf-stable (non-TCS) — no delivery restriction:

• Baked goods. Breads, rolls, biscuits, cookies, scones, muffins, donuts, brownies, cupcakes, tortillas, waffles, quick breads, cakes (including wedding cakes), perishable baked goods that do not require refrigeration for safety, pastries without dairy-cream filling, fruit pies, hand pies, churros, Danish, empanadas (without meat or unpasteurized dairy), tamales (without meat).
• Candies and confections. Brittles, fudge, truffles, chocolate, dipped chocolates, hard candies, toffees, caramels, marshmallows, cotton candy, chocolate-covered fruits and nuts.
• Condiments and sauces. Ketchup, mustards, nut butters, oils, pickles, salsas, sauces, syrups, vinegars, honey-mustard, BBQ sauces (acidified or shelf-stable formulations), pickle relish.
• Honey. Up to 150 gallons per year. Honey is the one category with an explicit volume cap in the act — not a revenue cap, but a volume cap reflecting the separate state apiary regulations.
• Jams, jellies, preserves, and fruit butters. Including chutneys, applesauce, fruit butters, and any formulation that meets the 21 CFR Part 150 standards of identity.
• Acidified foods. Pickles, salsas, hot sauces, BBQ sauces, and other acidified products at pH ≤ 4.6. Tennessee is one of the only US states that allows acidified foods at the cottage food tier without a separate process authority letter or scheduled-process filing. Most states either prohibit acidified foods entirely (Georgia, South Carolina, Massachusetts) or require a full FDA acidified-foods pathway under 21 CFR Part 114. Tennessee does not.
• Low-acid canned foods. This is the unicorn allowance. Most states explicitly prohibit low-acid canned foods (anything with a finished pH above 4.6 that is shelf-stable in a sealed container — green beans, pumpkin butter, chili in a jar) under cottage food, because low-acid canning carries genuine Clostridium botulinum risk if done improperly. Tennessee permits low-acid canned foods under the Food Freedom Act, on the theory that the producer is responsible for the safety of the food they produce and the disclaimer alerts the consumer. A producer making low-acid canned products should still follow proper pressure-canning protocols — the legal allowance does not eliminate the underlying food-safety physics. But the legal authorization to sell exists, and Tennessee is one of perhaps three US states where it does.
• Dry goods. Cereals, coffee beans (roasted), dried fruit, dried vegetables, herbs, dry pasta, spices, tea blends, dry mixes (cake mix, bread mix, brownie mix, dry soup mix, dry seasoning mix), trail mixes.
• Snacks. Granola, popcorn (including kettle corn, caramel corn), crackers, roasted and seasoned nuts, vegetable chips, chocolate-covered items.
• Fermented foods. Sauerkraut, kimchi, fermented hot sauces, fermented pickles, ginger beer (non-alcoholic), water kefir grains (the product, not the live culture distributed for propagation), kombucha (under 0.5% ABV).
• Frozen produce. Frozen fruits and vegetables packaged for retail sale.
• Hardboiled whole eggs. With shells intact, sold whole. (Liquid eggs and shell eggs are governed by separate state egg-handling rules.)
• Juices. Pasteurized and unpasteurized fruit and vegetable juices.

Time-and-temperature controlled (TCS) — in-person handoff only:

• Foods containing pasteurized dairy. Hard cheeses (cheddar, mozzarella, gouda, parmesan), butter, yogurt, kefir, cultured buttermilk, cream-based soups, quiches, cheesecakes, custard pies, cream-filled pastries, dairy-based desserts. The dairy ingredient itself must be pasteurized — unpasteurized milk is excluded categorically and is governed by separate Tennessee raw milk rules. The finished product can be sold under the Food Freedom Act if every other condition is met.
• Foods containing poultry. Whole birds, parts, and prepared poultry products (rotisserie chicken, chicken pot pies, chicken soup, turkey sandwiches sold as finished food) using either (1) federally or state-inspected poultry under 9 CFR § 381.10(d), with a 75-pound-per-transaction limit for direct sales of inspected poultry to a single consumer; or (2) poultry produced by a small-flock farmer operating under the federal 1,000-bird exemption at 9 CFR § 381.10(c), where the same farmer slaughters, processes, and prepares the cottage food product.
• Hardboiled eggs in prepared form. Egg salad, deviled eggs, breakfast burritos, breakfast sandwiches — anything where the egg is incorporated into a finished food rather than sold as whole shelled eggs.

Excluded categorically, regardless of source or preparation:

• Unpasteurized milk and unpasteurized milk products (still governed by separate Tennessee raw milk rules under T.C.A. § 53-3-119, which permits "incidental" raw milk sales under narrow conditions but not under the Food Freedom Act).
• Alcoholic beverages (>0.5% ABV by volume) and any food product incorporating alcoholic beverages as an ingredient (brandy-soaked cherries, bourbon brownies, wine jellies).
• Fish, shellfish, and seafood products.
• Red meat and meat byproducts, with one narrow carve-out: a producer who buys USDA-inspected meat may prepare and sell finished cottage food products containing that meat directly to consumers, but only in person and only in Tennessee. Meat jerkies, dried meats, and meat-based snacks remain excluded because they sit on top of an FDA inspection regime that does not yield to state cottage food law.
• Cannabis, hemp-derived cannabinoid products (THC, Delta-8, Delta-9, CBD edibles), and any product containing these ingredients.

The result is a list that covers almost every kind of finished home-prepared food a small producer would reasonably want to sell. The interesting tradeoffs are no longer about whether you can sell something — they're about which channel you can use to sell it.

Where you can sell (and the in-person-only rule for TCS)

Tennessee's sales-channel framework is structurally bimodal. Non-TCS foods can move through nearly any channel inside the state. TCS foods can only move through one — the in-person handoff. Most producer confusion at the local farmers market on a Saturday morning comes from blurring these two channels.

Non-TCS sales channels (everything shelf-stable):

TCS sales channels (anything containing pasteurized dairy or poultry):

The structural intuition behind the bimodal framework is straightforward: TCS foods require temperature control to remain safe, and Tennessee's framework places the responsibility for that temperature control on a direct producer-to-consumer handoff that can be observed and verified. A shelf-stable cookie does not care whether it sits in a UPS truck for three days; a quiche cares quite a lot. Rather than impose a temperature-monitoring requirement on every channel (which would require an inspection regime), Tennessee solved the problem by limiting TCS foods to the one channel where the producer is physically present.

This is the same structural choice Arizona made when it authorized TCS foods under HB 2042 (2024), though Arizona's rule is differently shaped — Arizona allows a two-hour delivery window from the producer's kitchen to a single customer destination, while Tennessee simply requires the sale to be in person. Both are structural counterweights to the expanded food list. Both are easy to misunderstand. Both are non-negotiable.

What the label has to say

The Tennessee Food Freedom Act exempts homemade food from "all packaging and labeling laws of the state" — which is a remarkable sentence to read in a statute. What it does not exempt is one verbatim disclaimer, which the act explicitly requires regardless of every other exemption.

The disclaimer text, set by statute:

"This product was produced at a private residence that is exempt from state licensing and inspection. This product may contain allergens."

The disclaimer must be communicated to the consumer through one of four channels, depending on how the food is sold:

1. On the package label, if the food is sold in a sealed package.
2. On a placard at the point of sale, if the food is sold unpackaged (a tray of cookies at the farmers market booth, a basket of breads at the roadside stand).
3. On the website or product listing, if the food is sold online (including ordering platforms for in-person pickup).
4. Orally to the consumer, if the food is sold by phone or by custom order with verbal communication.

The disclaimer language is statutory. It cannot be paraphrased, summarized, or softened. "Made in a home kitchen" by itself is not the disclaimer. "Made in a private residence that is exempt from state inspection" by itself is not the disclaimer. The verbatim sentence is the disclaimer. Both clauses (about state licensing/inspection AND about allergens) must appear. This is the part most new producers shorten and then have to redo when a market manager catches the abbreviation.

What the state does not require, but you should include anyway:

• Producer name and contact information. Either your name or your business name, plus an email address, phone number, or address. The act does not require this — but if a customer wants to follow up, contact you about a wedding cake order, or report a quality issue, they need a way to find you. Including contact info is also good faith with the consumer who is being asked to trust the disclaimer.
• Product name. Self-explanatory; "Sourdough Boule" is clearer than nothing.
• Full ingredient list. In descending order by weight, as required by federal food labeling law (which applies the moment a packaged food enters commerce, regardless of state cottage food exemption).
• Major allergen disclosure. The nine major allergens defined by FALCPA and the FASTER Act — milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, sesame — must be disclosed in plain language, either in parentheses after the ingredient name or in a separate "Contains:" statement after the ingredient list. Federal allergen-labeling rules apply to all foods in commerce regardless of cottage food status.
• Net weight or volume. Useful for consumer comparison and required under federal labeling rules for packaged foods in commerce.
• Production date or lot number. Especially for TCS foods, where age matters; even shelf-stable items benefit from a lot identifier when you eventually need to trace a batch.

The state of Tennessee will not enforce these "best practice" elements. The federal allergen-labeling rules theoretically apply but are rarely the subject of enforcement at the cottage food scale. The reason to include the elements anyway is that they are how a small business is supposed to operate, and the day a customer claims a tree nut allergen wasn't disclosed is a worse day if there is no record of the disclosure than if there is.

Three Tennessee producers and how the law fits each one

Three composite Tennessee cottage food producers — none real, all constructed from common patterns — make the framework concrete. Names are convenience; the situations are the point.

Maya, a Knoxville baker who sells at the Saturday farmers market. Maya bakes sourdough loaves, cinnamon rolls, focaccia, biscuits, scones, and seasonal pies (without dairy filling). She works out of her home kitchen and sells direct from a market booth on Saturdays, plus pickup orders from her Instagram DMs on Wednesdays. Annual sales: about twenty thousand dollars. Every product she sells is shelf-stable and non-TCS. Maya operates entirely inside the non-TCS framework. She has no permit, no inspection, no training certificate, no annual paperwork, no fee. Her labels carry the verbatim disclaimer plus her business name, contact info, and ingredient list. She ships orders to customers in Memphis through USPS Priority Mail (in-state mail order is allowed for non-TCS). She has placed a small wholesale order with a Knoxville coffee shop for biscotti to sell with espresso — the coffee shop is a retail food sales establishment, the biscotti are non-TCS, the wholesale is authorized under the act. The Tennessee Food Freedom Act is, for Maya, almost invisible. It does not impose paperwork. It does not require inspection. It does not constrain her sales channels. The only thing it asks of her is the disclaimer.

Ben, a Memphis hot-sauce producer with two acidified products and a Tennessee retail wholesale plan. Ben makes a fermented hot sauce (final pH 3.4) and a Carolina-mustard BBQ sauce (final pH 3.8). Both are acidified products at pH ≤ 4.6. Both are shelf-stable and non-TCS. Ben sells direct online to in-state customers through his website, at the Memphis Farmers Market on Saturdays, and at four Memphis-area gift shops and gourmet groceries that buy his sauces at wholesale. Annual sales: about sixty-five thousand dollars. Ben does not have a process authority letter, does not file scheduled processes, and is not registered with FDA — and under Tennessee's framework, he does not have to be. The Food Freedom Act explicitly authorizes acidified foods at the cottage food tier. Ben is responsible for his own pH testing and product safety, but no state permit, license, or inspection attaches. His labels carry the disclaimer, business name, contact info, ingredients with allergen disclosures (mustard is one of his major allergens), and the production date and batch number on each bottle. Ben's main constraint is that he cannot ship out of state. Customers from Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Georgia regularly email asking if he ships — and the answer, every time, is no. Interstate commerce in acidified foods is federally regulated under 21 CFR 114, and federal law does not yield to Tennessee's exemption. If Ben wants to ship out of state, he has to register a food facility, complete Better Process Control School, secure a process authority letter for each formulation, and file a scheduled process with FDA — a $1,500–$3,000 compliance investment that, today, he chooses not to make.

Lena, a Chattanooga baker who added rotisserie chicken pot pies after HB 130 took effect in 2025. Lena was operating under the Food Freedom Act since 2022 selling shelf-stable baked goods — sourdough, ciabatta, focaccia, croissants without dairy filling. When HB 130 expanded the act on July 1, 2025 to include pasteurized dairy and poultry items, Lena added a Sunday rotisserie chicken pot pie to her offerings. She buys USDA-inspected whole birds from a regional grocer, roasts and pulls them in her home kitchen, and bakes the meat into double-crust pot pies with a cream-based filling. Annual sales: about thirty-two thousand dollars, of which about a third is now the pot pies and other Sunday-only TCS items. Lena cannot ship the pot pies. She cannot wholesale them to her Chattanooga coffee-shop wholesale customer. She cannot deliver them through DoorDash. The pot pies are TCS — they contain pasteurized dairy and poultry, both — and the in-person handoff rule applies. Lena solved the channel constraint by switching her TCS items to a Sunday-only pre-order pickup window at her home: customers order through her website by Friday, pay online, and pick up the pot pie on Sunday afternoon between 1 and 4 p.m. The customer drives to her, she hands them the pie still warm from the oven, and the transaction is complete. Her sourdough loaves and other shelf-stable products continue to ship through USPS to in-state customers and to wholesale through her two coffee-shop accounts. Lena now operates two parallel channels under the same exemption: a non-TCS channel that uses every distribution option Tennessee allows, and a TCS channel that uses only the in-person handoff. The bifurcation is annoying for the first month and then becomes routine.

How Tennessee compares to its eight neighbors

The structural distinctiveness of the Tennessee Food Freedom Act is easier to see in context. The table below compares the eight states bordering Tennessee, plus Tennessee itself, across the seven dimensions that matter most for a home producer deciding which framework to operate under.

The contrast is sharpest on two dimensions. First, the TCS authorization. Tennessee is the only state in this nine-state set that authorizes TCS foods at the cottage food tier, and one of only two or three states nationwide (Arizona is the other major one) that does so. Second, the acidified food list. Tennessee allows acidified foods (and the rarer low-acid canned foods) without a separate program. North Carolina allows acidified foods but routes them through the federal 21 CFR 114 framework with mandatory Better Process Control School and a process authority letter. Kentucky requires a processing approval course. Every other state in the region either prohibits acidified foods entirely or pushes them out of cottage food and into a separate license.

The dimensions where Tennessee is not uniquely permissive are also worth noting. Tennessee does not authorize interstate sales (no US state does, under any cottage food framework). Tennessee does not authorize wholesale of TCS foods (no US state does at the cottage tier). Tennessee does not authorize unpasteurized milk (which is separately regulated under T.C.A. § 53-3-119). On every other dimension a producer would consider, Tennessee is the most permissive option in the southeast and one of the most permissive in the country.

Common mistakes Tennessee producers make in year one

The framework is simple but it has corners. Five mistakes consistently catch new producers in their first twelve months under the Food Freedom Act.

Mistake 1: Treating the in-state-only rule as informal. It isn't. Customers from out of state — including from across the Tennessee border in Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia — regularly contact Tennessee producers asking to order. The Food Freedom Act does not authorize those sales; the moment a package crosses a state line, FDA jurisdiction picks up. The producer who ships one box to a wedding in Atlanta has technically manufactured a food product for interstate commerce without a federally registered food facility. Federal enforcement is rare at the cottage scale but the legal status is unambiguous. The discipline is to politely decline out-of-state orders and route those customers to a state-licensed bakery or to your future plans.

Mistake 2: Shipping TCS foods because the cottage food cap is gone. The 2022 act removed the cap. The 2025 amendment authorized TCS foods. New producers conflate these two changes and assume that because the cap is gone and TCS is now allowed, they can freely ship TCS products in-state. They cannot. TCS foods must be sold in person, by the producer or an agent or employee acting on the producer's behalf, regardless of the destination. In-state mail order works for cookies. It does not work for cheesecake.

Mistake 3: Paraphrasing the disclaimer. The statute sets the disclaimer language verbatim. "Made in a home kitchen" is shorter and feels equivalent, but the statutory disclaimer must include both clauses — about state licensing/inspection AND about allergens — in the exact wording the act prescribes. Market managers and inspectors who see your booth on a Saturday will know the wording. Print the full sentence. Use the full sentence on your website. The shortcut creates a label-compliance problem that the producer then has to redo with corrected packaging.

Mistake 4: Confusing the act's exemption from labeling laws with an exemption from federal allergen rules. The Tennessee Food Freedom Act exempts homemade food from Tennessee state labeling laws. It does not, and cannot, exempt food from federal allergen labeling rules under FALCPA and the FASTER Act. Major-allergen disclosures (milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, sesame) must appear on a packaged food label in commerce regardless of state cottage food status. The statutory exemption from state labeling laws is real but narrow.

Mistake 5: Reading an outdated guide. Pre-2022 Tennessee guides describe the old Domestic Kitchen / Department of Health dual framework with a revenue cap, an inspection requirement, and a narrower food list. Those guides are no longer accurate. Pre-2025 guides describe the post-HB-813 act but without the TCS expansion. Those guides are also no longer accurate. Forrager, Cottage CMS, PickYourOwn, and the various cottage-food-license aggregator sites have all been updated to varying degrees, but the legal text at T.C.A. § 53-1-118 is the canonical source. If a third-party summary disagrees with the statute, the statute wins.

A simple records system that satisfies a Department of Health investigation

The act exempts producers from licensing, permitting, inspection, packaging, and labeling laws — but it preserves the Tennessee Department of Health's investigative authority for reported foodborne illness. If a Tennessee Food Freedom Act producer is named in a foodborne illness complaint, the Department of Health has the authority to investigate, and the exemption pauses for the duration of that investigation.

A simple records system makes that investigation finite rather than open-ended. The system has five parts and takes about ten minutes per batch:

1. A production log. A simple notebook, a spreadsheet, or an inventory and batch-tracking tool that records: date of production, product made, batch identifier or lot number, quantity produced, ingredients used (and from which supplier), pH reading (for acidified products), and any notes on storage or temperature.
2. A sales log. Date, channel (farmers market name, online order number, retail wholesale customer name), quantity sold, and where possible, the customer's name or order reference. For online sales and wholesale, your platform already tracks this; for direct sales at a farmers market, a tally sheet at the booth captures it.
3. A supplier file. Receipts or screenshots from your ingredient and packaging suppliers showing what you bought and when. The point is not the receipts themselves but the ability to identify whether a contaminated ingredient came from a specific lot.
4. Label drafts and a label change log. A folder with one copy of every label you have ever used, dated, so that if a complaint references a product purchased in October you can show what the label said at that time.
5. An incident log. Anything that goes sideways — a customer complaint, a batch you discarded, a supplier ingredient you returned, an oven malfunction. Most of these will never come up again. The one that does will be the one you want documented.

This is not the records system of a commercial kitchen. It is the records system of a small producer who would rather have ten minutes of documentation than ten hours of reconstruction if the Department of Health calls. The Food Freedom Act does not require any of it. Common sense does.

Related reading

• Texas Cottage Food Law: What You Can Sell, Revenue Caps, and Labeling Requirements — The post-SB-541 Texas framework has a $150,000 cap and authorizes wholesale through a cottage food vendor route, a structurally different path to retail than Tennessee's direct-wholesale rule.
• Arizona Cottage Food Law After HB 2042 — The other major US state to authorize TCS foods at the cottage tier. Same structural counterweight (in-person handoff for TCS), different implementation (Arizona uses a two-hour delivery window, Tennessee uses "in person").
• Batch Tracking for Food Sellers — The simple records system above, expanded into a full lot-tracking guide. Useful if you produce anything in batches large enough that a recall would mean reconstructing what went where.

Stay close to the source

Tennessee's framework is unusual in how little it asks. That is a feature when you are operating inside it; it is a liability if you assume the absence of paperwork means an absence of rules. The rules are real and they live in one statute that is short enough to read in fifteen minutes:

• T.C.A. § 53-1-118 — Tennessee Food Freedom Act. The state's primary reference page.
• Tennessee Department of Agriculture Food Freedom Act guidance. The state agency's published interpretation, including the verbatim disclaimer and the list of excluded products.
• Public Chapter 862 (HB 813, 2022). The text of the 2022 act that replaced the prior Domestic Kitchen and DOH frameworks.
• Public Chapter 431 (HB 130, 2025). The 2025 amendment authorizing TCS foods.
• 9 CFR § 381.10. The federal poultry inspection exemptions that the TCS expansion rides on.
• 21 CFR Part 114 — Acidified Foods. What you would have to comply with if Tennessee did not exempt you. Worth reading to understand what the exemption is doing for you.

If you are a Tennessee producer trying to figure out what to track, where you can sell, and how to handle the in-person handoff rule for TCS foods, Ardent Seller is a multi-tenant inventory and production tool for small makers and home food businesses. The free Maker Plan handles the records side of the Food Freedom Act — lot tracking, batch costs, channel-by-channel sales, label revisions, and a simple complaint log — at no cost. The framework above is the law; the system below it is the part that protects you when the framework's good faith gets tested.

Free resources

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

• Cottage Food Laws by State — The full 50-state-plus-DC quick reference PDF, with Tennessee's no-cap food-freedom framework and the post-HB-130 TCS authorization captured alongside every other state's framework.
• Cottage Food Revenue Cap Tracker — Tracks gross sales against each state's cap. Tennessee has no cap, so the tracker mostly verifies you stay inside the in-state-only and TCS-channel constraints — but if you ever expand into a capped neighboring state, the tracker is already set up.
• Home Bakers Order and Delivery Tracker — Captures the in-person handoff window for TCS foods (pickup date, time, customer contact) that the Food Freedom Act asks Lena, in the third example above, to manage every Sunday.

Sources & methodology

This guide is based on the text of the Tennessee Food Freedom Act as of May 2026, including amendments through HB 130 (Public Chapter 431, effective July 1, 2025), and on the Tennessee Department of Agriculture's published guidance.

• T.C.A. § 53-1-118 — Tennessee Food Freedom Act — primary statute, label disclaimer, sales channel framework, TCS expansion.
• Public Chapter 862 (HB 813, 2022) — the 2022 act repealing prior frameworks and establishing the Food Freedom Act.
• Public Chapter 431 (HB 130, 2025) — the 2025 amendment adding TCS foods to the allowed list.
• 9 CFR § 381.10 — federal poultry inspection exemptions (1,000-bird and inspected sources) that the TCS allowance references.
• Tennessee Department of Agriculture — Food Freedom Act guidance — the state's official interpretation, including label requirements, allowed and excluded products, and enforcement scope.
• Forrager — Tennessee Cottage Food Law — third-party summary used for cross-checking the food category list and venue framework. Forrager has been updated to reflect HB 130 changes; older third-party summaries may not be.

Data freshness: the statute was last amended on July 1, 2025. The Tennessee Department of Agriculture's guidance page is updated when the legislature amends the act. This guide reflects the law as of May 2026.

This article is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, regulatory, food-safety, or health advice. Cottage food laws, labeling requirements, allowed food categories, and TCS food handling rules vary by jurisdiction and change frequently. Consult the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, your local health department, or a qualified compliance attorney before making compliance, labeling, or product decisions based on this content.