Not a cottage food law, a food freedom law
Tennessee operates under the Tennessee Food Freedom Act, and the framing matters. Foods produced in a home kitchen under the Act are broadly exempt from the state's licensing, permitting, inspecting, packaging, and labelling laws, with an exception for a Department of Health investigation into a reported foodborne illness.
No permit. No licence. No registration. No inspection. No training requirement. No sales cap. The Department of Agriculture says plainly that it does not issue permits or conduct inspections for these products.
That is about as permissive as US food regulation gets. Which makes the two things Tennessee *does* ask for worth reading carefully, because there are so few of them.
The lot number is the interesting requirement
Your label needs a lot number or a date, for the purpose of tracing the food in the event of a market withdrawal.
Very few states ask for this, and the stated reason is what makes it different. Elsewhere a date is about freshness or about telling an inspector when you made something. Here it is explicitly a recall mechanism. If a product has to come off the market, the lot number is how you and the buyer work out which product.
Treat it as the tool it is rather than a box to fill. A lot number that only you can interpret, or one applied inconsistently across a market day, will not do the job at the moment it is needed. Pick a simple scheme, write it down, and keep a note of what went into each lot. A date works, and a date plus a batch letter works better if you make more than one batch a day.
The rest of the label
- The name of the food
- The name and street address of the producer
- The amount of food in the package, in both imperial and metric units, so both ounces and grams
- The ingredients, in order of prominence by weight
Note the dual-unit net quantity, which Tennessee shares with Michigan, New York and North Carolina. "8 oz" alone is not what the Act asks for.
Allergens: recommended, and do it anyway
Tennessee recommends noting allergens rather than requiring it. That is unusual; most states require the declaration outright.
The recommendation is worth following regardless, and not out of caution for its own sake. A buyer with a serious allergy has no way to assess an unlabelled product except to put it down, so an allergen line is the difference between a sale and a walk-away. Retailers ask. And if you ever move outside the Act, into wholesale or across a state line, the declaration stops being optional and you will want the habit already formed.
The nine major allergens are milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame.
The requirement that is not on the label at all
For sales made over the phone or by custom order, you must tell the customer that the product is homemade, exempt from state licensing and inspection, and may contain allergens.
Spoken, at the point of sale, for an order placed without the package in front of the buyer. No other state in this cluster has a verbal disclosure obligation.
The practical answer is a script. Write the sentence once, keep it by the phone, and use it every time, because this is precisely the kind of obligation that gets remembered on the first three calls and forgotten on the fourth. If you take custom cake orders by phone, this applies to you on every one of them.
The Nutrition Facts panel
Tennessee exempts you from state labelling law. It cannot exempt you from federal law, and the Nutrition Facts panel is federal.
Most home producers sit inside 21 CFR 101.9(j)(1): annual gross sales of $500,000 or less, or annual gross sales of food to consumers of $50,000 or less, with nothing to file.
With no state cap, Tennessee will not slow your growth, so those federal figures are the only ceiling in play. And the more common trigger applies as everywhere: a nutrient content or health claim on the label, in labeling, or in advertising ends the exemption at any level of sales.
One Tennessee-specific note on that. Because the Act sweeps away so much state labelling law, it is tempting to read the whole area as unregulated and start adding marketing claims freely. The federal claim rule is untouched by the Act. "High protein" on a Tennessee label costs you the panel exemption exactly as it would in California.
Making the panel
Nutrifax builds it from your recipe against USDA FoodData Central, in the FDA 2016 format, rounded per 21 CFR 101.9. Import or build the recipe, check each ingredient match, set the serving size from the reference amount for your category, and export a print-ready PDF or PNG.
Related pages
- Cottage Food Label Requirements by State
- When Nutrition Labels Are Required in the US
- US FDA Nutrition Label Requirements for Small Producers
- Serving Size and Rounding Rules (US FDA)
- FDA nutrition label generator
Sources
- Tennessee Department of Agriculture: Tennessee Food Freedom Act
- FDA: Small business nutrition labeling exemption guide
- FDA: Food allergies and the major food allergens
- eCFR: 21 CFR 101.9 (Nutrition labeling of food)
Disclaimer
Educational content only; not legal advice. Confirm current requirements with the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, and confirm the final label against current regulations for your product and jurisdiction.