Confita
What Illinois actually decides
The Home-to-Market Act replaced a farmers-market-only rule with a single statewide cottage food operation, and it is worth understanding how far that went. Illinois is a prohibited-list state, so the question is not whether your product appears on an approved list. Acidified and fermented foods, kimchi, hot sauce, canned tomatoes and salsa, cultivated mushrooms, microgreens, roasted coffee and bottled drinks are all in scope. So are buttercream-frosted baked goods, which many states exclude.
The requirement that surprises people is the training. Everyone who prepares or packages product needs a Certified Food Protection Manager certificate approved by the Department. In practice that is an ANSI-accredited course of at least eight hours with a proctored exam, somewhere between $100 and $300, valid for five years. A food handler card does not satisfy it. Staff who only handle sales, marketing or admin do not need one.
Registration is with the local health department where you operate, and once you hold the certificate you can sell anywhere in the state. The fee runs from nothing to $50, set locally and capped by statute. If your county has no local health department it contracts with an adjacent one. Keep a copy of your certificate available, because any local health department can ask to see it.
Budget for testing separately. Acidified, fermented and tomato products need a tested recipe or lab pH testing, a private well may need a water test, and the department can require a lab test before you sell a baked good containing cheese. None of that is in the registration fee.
One caveat on the sourcing. The agency's own page did not spell out the date a recent change took effect, so those came from the statute and secondary sources rather than from Illinois Department of Public Health and your local health department directly. Everything else on this page was read off an official source on September 9, 2026. If one of those points decides your case, ask them.
The short version
What you can sell in Illinois
Straight from the official record. Read these as categories rather than a menu, because one recipe can cross the line on its own: a filling that needs refrigeration, a pH that needs testing, or a process that needs an authority to sign it off.
- Any food or drink, except the prohibited categories. Illinois is a prohibited-list state, not an approved-list one
- Baked goods, including breads, cookies, pies, cakes and buttercream-frosted baked goods
- Candy, including caramel and other confections that do not need time or temperature control
- Jams, jellies and preserves
- Acidified and fermented foods such as pickles, kimchi and hot sauce, with a tested recipe or a food safety plan plus pH testing
- Canned tomatoes and tomato products such as salsa, with a USDA or extension-tested recipe or annual lab acidification testing
- Dry goods: dry noodles, dry baking mixes, spice and seasoning blends, dried herbs, trail mix
- Roasted coffee and dry tea blends
- Cut leafy greens that are dehydrated, acidified, or blanched and frozen
- Extracts such as vanilla, and baked goods made with alcohol, where the product is not meant as a beverage
- Cultivated mushrooms and microgreens
- Bottled drinks other than kombucha and alcoholic beverages
What is outside the rule
If your product is on this list, the answer is not "ask nicely". It is a different licence, a different kitchen, or both.
- Meat, poultry, fish, seafood or shellfish
- Dairy, except as an ingredient in a baked good or candy that needs no time or temperature control, such as caramel, or in a frosting such as buttercream
- Eggs, except as an ingredient in a food that needs no time or temperature control, including dry noodles, or in a frosting such as buttercream, and never raw
- Pumpkin pies, sweet potato pies, cheesecakes, custard pies, creme pies, and pastries with controlled foods as fillings or toppings
- Garlic in oil or oil infused with garlic unless the garlic oil is acidified, and low-acid canned foods
- Sprouts, cut leafy greens except dehydrated, acidified or blanched and frozen, and wild-harvested non-cultivated mushrooms
- Cut or pureed fresh tomato or melon, dehydrated tomato or melon, and frozen cut melon
- Alcoholic beverages and kombucha
