Nevada Cottage Food Approved Foods: What You Can and Cannot Sell

The Core Rule: Shelf-Stable and Dry-Heat Only

Nevada's cottage food law (NRS 446.866) limits home kitchen production to non-potentially hazardous foods — items that are shelf-stable at room temperature and do not require refrigeration to stay safe. On top of that, the food must be prepared using dry heat methods: baking in an oven or cooking on a hot skillet. Frying and steaming are not allowed.

This two-part test eliminates a lot of products that home cooks assume they can sell. Understanding exactly where the line falls saves you from registering a business, designing labels, and investing in supplies for a product that turns out to be illegal from your home kitchen.

What You Can Sell

Baked goods: Loaf breads, rolls, biscuits, cookies, celebration cakes (birthday cakes, wedding cakes with shelf-stable frosting), pastries, and fruit pies. These are the core of most Nevada cottage food operations. The frosting must be shelf-stable — buttercream made with butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla is fine.

Candies and confections: Hard candies, cotton candy, popcorn, popcorn balls, and candies made with commercial chocolate coatings. The chocolate must be sourced from approved commercial vendors — you cannot make raw cocoa paste at home.

Jams, jellies, and preserves: Standardized fruit jams, jellies, and preserves made with high-acid fruits following recipes that conform to 21 CFR Part 150. These must be packed in sterile jars with hermetic seals.

Dried goods: Dried herbs (for food flavoring only — medicinal herbs and supplements are prohibited), seasoning mixes, dried fruits, cereals, trail mixes, granola, and coated or uncoated nuts.

Vinegars: Plain vinegar and strained flavored vinegars. The key word is "strained" — the vinegar must be thoroughly filtered to remove all solid matter before bottling.

What You Cannot Sell

Cream-based frostings and fillings. This is the rule that catches the most home bakers off guard. Cream cheese frosting, meringue, custard fillings, and low-sugar frostings are all prohibited. A celebration cake with cream cheese frosting cannot be sold as cottage food — even if the cake itself is shelf-stable. The frosting is the disqualifying ingredient.

Specific baked goods. Pumpkin pie, cheesecake, cream-filled pastries, and anything with a custard or cream component require refrigeration and cannot be made under the cottage food exemption.

Meat and dairy products. Dried meats (like jerky), meat-filled pastries, and items containing fresh or unbaked dairy are completely excluded. These are potentially hazardous foods that require a commercial kitchen with temperature controls and health inspections.

Other prohibited items. Raw dough, dried or cooked pasta, fruit butters, sugar-free jams, low-sugar jellies, home-canned low-acid vegetables, dried vegetables, and infused vinegars containing solid components like herbs, garlic, or fruit rinds.

The Sourdough Question

Sourdough is a gray area that depends on your county. Washoe County's Northern Nevada Public Health (NNPH) guidelines explicitly prohibit sourdough starters in cottage food operations. The concern is that a live sourdough culture introduces biological variables that make the final product harder to classify as definitively shelf-stable.

If you operate in Clark County under SNHD, the prohibition is less explicit but the same underlying principle applies — your product must be non-potentially hazardous. Before investing in a sourdough-based product line, confirm with your specific health district whether they will approve it on your registration.

The Cream Cheese Frosting Trap

This deserves its own section because it derails so many home cake businesses. A baker who makes beautiful celebration cakes with cream cheese frosting cannot sell those cakes under a cottage food registration. Cream cheese is a dairy product that requires refrigeration — it makes the entire product potentially hazardous regardless of the cake underneath.

Your options:

• Switch to a shelf-stable frosting (American buttercream with butter, powdered sugar, and flavoring)
• Transition to a licensed commercial kitchen where you can use any ingredients
• Wait for AB 352's changes in July 2027, though even the expanded rules maintain the non-TCS requirement for cottage food

Sourcing Rules

Every raw ingredient must come from an approved commercial source — licensed grocery stores, commercial cash-and-carry wholesalers, or permitted distributors. You cannot use:

• Homegrown eggs or produce
• Uninspected animal products
• Raw milk
• Foraged ingredients

This means the eggs in your cookies must come from a store, the butter must be commercially produced, and the flour must be a commercial brand. The rule exists because commercially sourced ingredients have already passed through the regulated food safety system.

When You Need a Different Path

If your product does not fit the cottage food criteria, you have two alternatives:

Craft Food Operation — for acidified foods like pickles, salsas, and hot sauces. This requires registering with the Nevada Department of Agriculture, passing a food safety exam at an NDA field office ($30 testing fee + $50 application fee), getting every recipe reviewed by a Process Authority, and pH-testing every batch. It is more work, but it lets you sell shelf-stable acidified products from home.

Commercial kitchen — for anything perishable, wholesale, or beyond the cottage food product list. You lease space in a licensed commissary kitchen, go through a plan review with your health authority, and get a standard food establishment permit.

The Nevada Cottage Food & Home Food Business Guide includes a product eligibility decision matrix that walks you through the classification for any recipe, plus the complete registration process for both cottage food and craft food paths.

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