There has been a great deal of discussion recently about unattended or self-service cottage food stands in Texas. Unfortunately, some of that discussion has crossed the line from explaining an unsettled issue into stating, as fact, requirements that simply do not appear anywhere in Texas law.
Homemade Texas believes cottage food operators deserve accurate information about what the law actually says, what it does not say, and where an agency has filled in a perceived gap with its own interpretation. Those are different things, and the distinction matters.
From 2013 through 2019, the Texas Cottage Food Law specifically identified the locations where cottage food producers could sell their products. Those locations included a producer’s home, farmers’ markets, farm stands, and certain fairs, festivals, and events. Nowhere did the law require farm stands to be attended, nor did the statutory definition of a farm stand include any requirement that a seller be present. In 2019, the Texas Legislature removed those location restrictions and substantially broadened where cottage food sales could occur.
The Legislature has amended the cottage food statute repeatedly since the original law passed in 2011, including major revisions in 2013, 2019, and 2025. It knows how to impose a restriction when it wants one. Yet nowhere in the cottage food statute does Texas law say that a sale must be “face to face.” Nowhere does it say that a sale must be “person to person.” Nowhere does it say that a cottage food producer must be physically present when a customer takes possession of a product. And nowhere does it say that an unattended, self-service, porch, farm, or honor-system stand is prohibited. The current statute continues to use the concept of selling “directly to a consumer,” but it does not turn “directly” into a physical-presence requirement.
There is a provision addressing internet sales. When a consumer purchases cottage food online, Texas law places specific conditions on that transaction, including a personal-delivery requirement. This is the only type of sale that is required to be “personally delivered”.
Largely relying on provisions governing delivery of food, DSHS has taken the position that unattended cottage food stands are not permitted. At the same time, DSHS has advised that a customer may pre-order a cottage food product and the producer may leave that order at an unattended location for the customer to pick up. In other words, according to DSHS, the producer’s physical presence is not necessarily required when the consumer takes possession of the food. The distinction DSHS appears to draw is whether the consumer selected and purchased the product in advance or selected it from an unattended stand.
Homemade Texas does not find that distinction supported by the statute. Nothing in the Cottage Food Law says that a direct sale becomes unlawful merely because the consumer selects the product from a table rather than selecting it in advance. Nothing says that the producer must be physically present at the point of sale. And nothing says that an unattended transaction is permissible if the product was pre-ordered but prohibited if it was not. Those distinctions have been created through interpretation, not by the Legislature. Additionally, guidance in response to a Request for Determination does not carry the same legal weight that statute or a duly promulgated rule would.
The result is particularly difficult to reconcile with the claim, now being repeated online, that Texas cottage food sales must be “face to face” or “person to person.” If a producer may leave a pre-ordered product at an unattended location for a customer to retrieve, then even DSHS’s own interpretation does not require every cottage food transaction to be face to face.
The Legislature could have written a “face to face requirement”. It did not.
That matters. Laws do not ordinarily prohibit conduct simply because an agency can piece together provisions addressing other circumstances and infer that perhaps the Legislature meant to prohibit it. If the Texas Legislature intended to prohibit unattended cottage food sales, it could have said so. It could have required the operator to be physically present at every direct sale. It could have defined “direct sale” as a face-to-face transaction. It could have prohibited honor-system stands. It did none of those things.
We are therefore extremely disappointed to see some individuals and groups turning this disputed interpretation into a weapon against other cottage food operators. We have seen people confidently announce that “face-to-face sales are required,” warn other operators that they are breaking the law, encourage complaints, and circulate stories about operators supposedly being “shut down.”
This is a witch hunt that needs to stop.
There are plenty of specific requirements in the Texas Cottage Food Law. Cottage food operators should follow them. Homemade Texas has spent 15 years working to expand cottage food opportunities while educating producers about their responsibilities under the law. But compliance does not mean inventing requirements that are not there, and it certainly does not mean using an unclear legal issue as an excuse to harass, intimidate, report, or frighten another small business owner.
There is another important complication in many of the stories circulating about stands being “shut down.” Cottage food law is not necessarily the only law involved.
A local government may have ordinances governing structures, signage, home occupations, setbacks, traffic, parking, land use, or other matters unrelated to the Cottage Food Law. So if someone says, “My porch stand was shut down,” that statement alone tells us almost nothing. There is a very real possibility that the person who appeared at the property was a municipal code compliance officer rather than anyone from a health department, and that the issue involved a local ordinance rather than cottage food law.
This is why Homemade Texas has one urgent request for anyone who is told by a government official that an unattended cottage food stand is illegal: please get it in writing.
Ask who is making the determination. Ask what agency or department that person represents. Ask for the specific statute, regulation, ordinance, or rule that the official believes you are violating. Ask for a written notice. If the official will not provide one, send an email afterward documenting the conversation and asking them to confirm their position in writing.
Then send it to us.
Homemade Texas cannot effectively advocate from secondhand stories. “Someone came to my house and told me to shut it down” does not tell us whether the person was from a health department, code compliance, zoning, or somewhere else. “They told me I could put up a camera and then it would be legal” may be an accurate account of what someone was told, but it does not tell us who said it, what authority they claimed to have, or where that supposed camera requirement came from.
Those stories may identify a real problem, but stories alone do not give us what we need to address it. We need the words. We need the government official’s position and the legal authority being asserted. Only then can we determine whether the official is correctly applying an existing law, enforcing an unrelated local ordinance, or imposing a requirement that does not exist.
The good news is that this does not have to remain ambiguous forever. Positive statutory clarification of unattended direct sales is already on the table for consideration as part of 2027 cottage food clean-up legislation.
Until then, Homemade Texas will continue to be precise about this issue. Texas cottage food law does not expressly prohibit unattended cottage food sales. It does not require “face-to-face” or “person-to-person” transactions. DSHS has determined that unattended sales are not permitted, based on its interpretation of statutory provisions that do not actually say that. However, entirely separate local ordinances, including zoning or land-use restrictions, may prohibit or restrict sales from a particular property regardless of what the cottage food law allows.
Those are the facts as they stand today.
And please, cottage food operators: stop policing one another based on rules that aren’t actually written in the law. We are all in this together; let’s start acting like it.
