Cottage food label laws by the numbers
We read the label rules for every Canadian province and territory and every US state, off the government's own page, and recorded what each one requires. 61 of 64 could be confirmed. This is what the whole set looks like at once. The 3 we could not confirm (Kansas, Massachusetts and Yukon) are excluded from every count rather than guessed at, because their governments' sites refused to be read.
The finding that surprised us
The American cottage-food label is largely an American institution. 8 of the 12 Canadian jurisdictions we confirmed require no "not inspected" statement at all, against 3 of 49 US states: 67% against 6%. A Canadian baker copying the sticker she has seen on an American blog is usually printing a sentence her province never asked for, and in 3 of them it is a false one, because the kitchen is inspected.
11 of 61 require no statement at all
That is 18% of everywhere we could read, and the reason splits two ways, which matters because the two call for opposite behaviour.
- 6 inspect the kitchen before any sale, so there is nothing to disclaim and printing a not-inspected line would be false: Maine, North Carolina, Northwest Territories, Ontario, Pennsylvania and Quebec.
- 5 publish no wording, exempting the kitchen and simply saying nothing about labels: Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.
Where a statement is required, 84% of them want it word for word
42 of the 50 jurisdictions that require a statement publish fixed text to reproduce exactly. Only 8 describe what the label has to get across and leave the wording to you: Alabama, Alberta, British Columbia, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, New York and Nunavut. So a baker who rewrites the sentence to fit her sticker is out of step with the rule in most of North America.
21 set a minimum type size
42% of the jurisdictions that require a statement also say how big it has to be, which is a requirement rather than a design choice and the one most easily missed when a label is shrunk to fit: 15 at 10 point, 3 at 11 point, 3 at 12 point.
The statement itself runs from 22 to 269 characters
Median 99. The shortest is California and New York, at "Made in a Home Kitchen". The longest is Colorado's 269-character paragraph, which has to fit on the same sticker. A tool that lays out labels has to survive a 12x spread in how much text the law puts on them.
12 are enforced by a local office, not the state or province
20% of the time the answer that counts is your county, region or health unit rather than the government that wrote the rule, so the national answer is the wrong one to rely on: Alabama, British Columbia, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and Ontario.
15 ask for more than the statement
Beyond the statement and the six things every label carries, these add something else: a second line for the sticker, an advertising rule, a sign at the point of sale. It is the part that most often comes as a surprise, because it is not on the label at all.
Method, and how to use this
One researcher read each jurisdiction's own government page or regulation and recorded the required statement, whether it may be paraphrased, any minimum type size, who enforces it, and the source read. Where a government page could not be retrieved, the jurisdiction was left unconfirmed rather than filled in from a secondary source, which is why 3 are missing here rather than quietly estimated.
Every figure links to the jurisdictions behind it, and each of those pages links to the government source it was read from. Quote any of it; a link back to this page is welcome and lets your readers check the working.