Confita
What Tennessee actually decides
Most states write a cottage food programme and then list what you can do inside it. Tennessee did the opposite. Section 53-1-118 exempts the production and sale of homemade food items from the licensing, permitting, inspecting, packaging and labelling laws of the state, full stop, with one carve-out: the Department of Health investigating a reported foodborne illness. There is no permit to get because there is no permit. There is no allowed-food list because there is no list.
July 2025 extended it further. Foods that need time and temperature control became legal, pasteurised dairy and exempt poultry included. But they come with a condition the shelf-stable items do not have: they may only be sold in person, by you or by an agent such as a farm stand on the property where the food was made. So a chilled item cannot be shipped, mailed or sold through a grocery store, even though a cookie can.
Two lines end the exemption and both are easy to cross by accident. Producing anywhere other than a private residence puts you back under the food manufacturing licence, so a community kitchen, a church hall or a rented commercial space does not qualify. And the exemption covers sales inside Tennessee. Ship one order over a state line and you are in a different regime.
Counties and municipalities are preempted from prohibiting or regulating homemade food, which is unusually strong. What the exemption does not touch is tax law or the rest of business regulation, so a business licence and sales tax are still your problem.
One caveat on the sourcing. The agency's own page did not spell out the allowed-food list, the prohibited-food list or the training requirement, so those came from the statute and secondary sources rather than from Tennessee Department of Agriculture 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 Tennessee
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 homemade food item, a non-alcoholic beverage included, that needs no time or temperature control and is produced and packaged at your private residence. Tennessee has no codified allowed-food list, only this category
- Since 1 July 2025, homemade food items that do need time and temperature control, subject to the extra conditions in section 53-1-118(b)(3)
- Poultry, poultry byproducts and poultry food products, where the business runs under the federal 1,000-poultry exemption or uses only inspected and passed poultry bearing the official mark
- Pasteurised dairy inside a temperature-controlled item. Only unpasteurised milk is excluded
- Acidified canned foods such as salsas, pickles, chow chow and relish, at pH below 4.6
- Low-acid canned foods such as canned vegetables, beans, vegetable broth and pepper jelly, pressure-canned, at pH above 4.6
- Dehydrated and freeze-dried fruits, vegetables and candy
- Baked goods, candy, dry goods, jams and jellies, bottled condiments, and canned fermented foods such as sauerkraut, kimchi and kombucha. The last four entries come from a UT extension bulletin written before the 2025 amendment, not from TDA.
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.
- Unpasteurized milk, in a temperature-controlled item
- Alcoholic beverages, in a temperature-controlled item
- Fish, in a temperature-controlled item
- Shellfish products, in a temperature-controlled item
- Meat, meat byproducts and meat food products, red meat and dried meats such as jerky included, in a temperature-controlled item
- Anything sold across state lines. The exemption covers intrastate sales only
- Anything not produced at your private residence. A community kitchen, church, restaurant or commercial facility needs a TDA food manufacturing licence whatever the food is
- Tennessee publishes no prohibited list of its own; the five items above are the statute’s exclusions for temperature-controlled items, and the last two are derived from the definitions. A shelf-stable meat product would still meet the meat inspection laws the Act does not displace, which the statute does not spell out.
