Cottage food label requirements in Montana

Last checked 5 August 2026 · Informational only, not legal or food-safety advice. Verify anything important with your county or tribal environmental health office before you print a run of labels.

What goes on the label

1. The product name, in words a customer would use.
2. Every ingredient, heaviest first.
3. The major allergens, called out separately from the ingredient list.
4. Who made it: your name or your business name.
5. How to reach you.
6. The date it was made.

What the label has to say

As published for Montana, read on 5 August 2026:

Made in a home kitchen that is not subject to retail food establishment regulations or inspections.

This is published as fixed text, so reproduce it exactly rather than rewording it. It has to appear at 11 point type or larger, which is part of the requirement rather than a design choice.

Who actually enforces this

Montana sets the rules centrally but they are enforced locally, so the answer that counts is your own office's rather than the state's. Find the office nearest you.

The detail

The 11-point minimum is called out explicitly and only for this statement. Label must also carry operation name and address (city, state, zip), product name, ingredients in descending order by weight with sub-ingredients in parentheses, net quantity, and allergen information. Registration is $40 one-time, submitted with a recipe AND a proposed label for each product to the LOCAL environmental health office; adding recipes or moving forces re-registration and another fee. Unpackaged items such as wedding cakes put the label information on an invoice delivered with the cake. Separate and different scheme: the 2021 Montana Local Food Choice Act (SB 199) exempts homemade food sold to an 'informed end consumer' from licensing and labeling entirely, but requires the producer to inform the consumer the food has 'not been licensed, permitted, certified, packaged, labeled, or inspected under any official regulations', and confines sales to inside Montana, for home consumption or a traditional community event. Two regimes, two different label answers — establish which one the baker is under first.

Make one

Free, nothing saved, no account. It fills in Montana's wording for you and prints a sheet.

What it is What is in it, heaviest first Make the labels

Where to verify all of this

Rules change, and this page can lag behind them. Before you rely on any of it:

• The rule itself
• your county or tribal environmental health office
• The office nearest you