Where to find your state's cottage food authority.

The short version: this page is a directory of the agency that administers cottage food law in each of the 51 US jurisdictions, with a link and a note on whether that agency's published text names freeze-drying at all. Of the 51 rows below, 23 name freeze-drying explicitly and 28 do not. The ones that do name it disagree in both directions, with California listing a category titled “Dried, Dehydrated, and Freeze-Dried Foods” [10] while New York puts “Freeze-dried foods” on its prohibited list [49]. Everything here describes what an agency publishes; it does not tell you what you may sell.

What this is, and what it is not

This is a directory, not advice. Each row names the agency, links its published page, and records one narrow fact: whether the words “freeze-dried,” “freeze dried” or “freeze drying” appear in the material that agency publishes. Nothing in the table says a product is legal or illegal where you live. Cottage food rules change by statute, by administrative rule and by agency page revision, and several of the pages linked below were revised during the year they were checked.

Two structural facts make the table readable. First, there is no federal cottage food statute; each state carves an exemption out of its own food establishment licensing law, and in several states a county or local health department administers or inspects on top of it. The federal layer that does exist sits behind the state rules: the acidified-foods regulation, for instance, defines its own scope using a water activity “greater than 0.85” together with a finished equilibrium pH of 4.6 or below [1], and multistate extension guidance places frozen and dehydrated food operations under federal current good manufacturing practice [3]. Second, the load-bearing idea in every state list is the non-TCS concept. Penn State Extension states the pairing plainly: TCS foods have “high moisture (aw > 0.85) and/or low acid content (pH > 4.6)” [2]. Dried and freeze-dried products reach non-TCS status by moisture removal, and most cottage food statutes never defined a test for it.

Cottage food authority by jurisdiction

Alphabetical. A “No” in the last column is a recorded silence in the material that was checked; it is not permission and it is not prohibition.

Every row was checked on the same date against the linked document.

Why silence means opposite things in opposite states

The 28 silent rows are not one finding. They sit inside two different statutory architectures, and the same blank means the reverse thing in each.

• Enumerated-permitted-list states publish a closed list of allowed products. Ohio is the clearest case: the allowed set is fixed by administrative rule, and every dried entry either presupposes a commercially dried ingredient or is a blend of dry ingredients [52][53]. In that architecture, a product absent from the list is outside the list.
• Exclusionary and food-freedom states permit what is not excluded, and define the boundary by food characteristic rather than by process. Tennessee's operative category is non-TCS homemade food [61]; Minnesota states the test as pH 4.6 or below, or water activity 0.85 or less [37]. In that architecture, an unnamed process is not thereby excluded.

This is why no single yes/no column is safe to act on by itself, and why the column above records the presence of language rather than a legal conclusion.

Where a state publishes a number, not a category

A small number of jurisdictions resolve the moisture question with a measurement instead of a product list. These are the ones that publish a threshold or a testing route in their cottage food material.

One further pattern is worth naming because it changes which page a reader should trust. In Oklahoma, freeze-drying is named by the extension service [55] and not by the agency bulletin [54]. In Colorado, it appears on the agency page [11] in both directions at once. Where agency text and extension text differ, the agency text is the one that governs the program, and it is the one linked in the table above. If your answer matters, the durable move is to put the question to your own state agency in writing and keep the reply alongside your records.

What we could not source

• Florida's live program page. The FDACS cottage food page returned 403 at the network egress layer and is disallowed by robots. The Florida row rests on FDACS guidance document FDACS-P-02072 as hosted by extension [17]. Whether the live page carries dried or freeze-dried language absent from the guidance is open, not closed.
• Washington's WSDA cottage food page body. Not retrievable this pass; the Washington row rests on the statute and rule text instead [66][67].
• Ohio's ODA program page URL. Not resolved; the row uses the administrative rule [52] and the agency fact sheet [53].
• Virginia's VDACS HTML landing page. Not retrieved; the row uses the VDACS FAQ PDF [65].
• Utah Administrative Code R70-560 rule text. The published URL now returns only a redirect notice, so the rule's own text, as distinct from the UDAF page and application form [63], was not read.
• Wyoming's Food Freedom Act Q&A. The agency page exposes it as a download link only [70]; it is the single most likely Wyoming location for a freeze-drying statement and it was not retrieved.
• North Dakota's post-2021 administrative rules. The chapter that would carry an allowed-foods list is largely repealed and no replacement was located; the row rests on the statute [51].
• Vermont's Act 42 (2025) codified text. The general licensing section contains no cottage food definition or cap; the Vermont row rests on the Department of Health page alone [64].
• South Carolina's current agency name. The Clemson guidance retains the pre-reorganization agency name [59]; no successor state agency page was fetched to confirm who administers the law today.
• The District's approved-foods list. Neither DC Health document publishes an affirmative allowed list: only prohibitions plus the laboratory submission pathway [15][16].
• West Virginia's Article 40 status. The 2026 committee amendment creating a new cottage foods article was located, but whether it was enacted, and its effective date, were not confirmed; the row rests on the agency page [68].
• Kansas's statutory citation. No statute number appears on the located Kansas Department of Agriculture pages; the state publishes an exemption list rather than a cottage food registration [29].
• Louisiana's agency program page. None located. The Louisiana row rests on the statute [32].
• Any ranking. No agency in the set publishes a comparative ordering of jurisdictions by permissiveness, and the columns are not commensurable: North Carolina has no revenue cap but requires inspection [50]; Michigan has a cap but no inspection [36]; Arizona has neither cap nor fee but requires continuously maintained food handler training [6]. No ordering is offered here.
• Sublime Pantry has bench-tested nothing in this article. Every entry above is a reading of somebody else's published page on a stated date.

Next

• The economics of selling what you dry covers what the rules cost once you price a unit.
• What water activity measures is the threshold several of these statutes are written around.
• What freeze-drying does to candy, a category that comes up repeatedly in the rows above.