Cottage food laws in South Carolina

The limits

Sales cap

None (no revenue limit specified by SCDA)

You can sell

Non-potentially-hazardous (non-TCS) foods, including baked goods, jams and jellies (high-acid, standard recipe), candy, and dried goods/herbs. Full category-by-category detail is maintained in Clemson Extension's Home-Based Food Production Law Guidance Document, produced in partnership with SCDA.

You cannot sell

SCDA's official Home-based Food Production Law Guidance (Version 1.4, 2025) contains a detailed 'Foods NOT Allowed' table (Chapter 5). Categories excluded from the law include: alcoholic products; all refrigerated foods and beverages (bottled juice/smoothie/tea/coffee/cocktail mixes, kombucha, kefir); breads made with fresh/frozen/canned fruit or vegetables, sourdough starter, pizza dough, sweet potato bread; carrot cake (unless made from a dry commercial mix with no added ingredients); canned foods generally, and specifically acidified foods, BBQ sauce, chow chow, chutney, fermented foods of any kind, fig preserves, hot sauce, low-sugar/low-acid jams and jellies, marinades, mustard, pepper jelly, pickles, relish, and salsa; cheesecake and other custard- or cream-filled items; charcuterie boards; pie/pastry fillings using fresh cream, fresh fruit, cream cheese, or caramel; freeze-dried/dried meat, melons, tomatoes, or fresh/frozen chopped produce; ice cream, filled candy, infused fruit items, liquor, and raw or processed meat/meat-containing products; milk; muffins; boiled peanuts and nut/seed butters or juices; pet treats and animal feed (regulated instead under the SC Commercial Feed Act); custard or meringue pie fillings (except meringue baked thin as a cookie); repackaged bulk poultry, pumpkin, or sweet potato products; CBD/Delta-8/Delta-9 products; and raw Swiss meringue made with non-pasteurized egg whites. Sourdough starter in any form (fresh, dehydrated, or freeze-dried) is separately confirmed as not allowed elsewhere in the guidance.

Getting set up

Permit / registration

Varies — SCDA does not issue permits, licenses, or certificates for home-based food producers, but producers must first confirm eligibility against the guidance document, then obtain an ID number through an online application before selling.

Cost

There is no fee to operate under South Carolina's Home-based Food Production Law. SCDA's guidance states that no license, permit, or mandatory application of any kind is required to produce and sell food under the law. Producers may optionally request an SCDA identification number (so they can put that number on labels instead of their home address), but that registration is explicitly voluntary, and the application form itself (Appendix F of the guidance) has no fee or payment field.

Training

Not confirmedUnverified — confirm with SCDA/Clemson Extension (sccottagefood@clemson.edu). SCDA's 35-page Home-based Food Production Law Guidance (Version 1.4, 2025) exhaustively covers kitchen sanitation, private-well water testing, allergen labeling, and dozens of specific product rules, but its full text contains no mention of any food safety training, certification course, or examination requirement for home-based producers. This is a strong absence given how comprehensive the document otherwise is, but the guidance never affirmatively states that training is not required, so per this project's sourcing rules it is reported as unverified rather than confirmed.

Kitchen inspection

No — SCDA does not permit, license, certify, or register home kitchens under this law; no inspection framework applies.

Labeling

SCDA's guidance requires every product label to include: (1) the name and address of the home-based food operation (or, if the producer does not want to list a home address, the SCDA identification number in its place); (2) the standard name of the product; (3) the ingredients in descending order of predominance by weight; and (4) a conspicuous statement, in all capital letters in a color that clearly contrasts with the background, reading: 'PROCESSED AND PREPARED BY A HOME-BASED FOOD PRODUCTION OPERATION THAT IS NOT SUBJECT TO SOUTH CAROLINA'S FOOD SAFETY REGULATIONS.' Allergen labeling is separately required: the label must name the food source for each of the nine major allergens present (wheat, soy, milk, egg, finfish, crustacean shellfish, peanuts, tree nuts, sesame), or disclaim that a major allergen may be present, and must specify the particular type when the allergen is tree nuts, finfish, or crustacean shellfish (e.g., walnuts, cod, shrimp). A Nutrition Facts panel is not required. Health claims may not be made on the label.

Where you can sell

Permitted venues

Direct to consumer, including online and mail order; South Carolina is also noted as one of the few states allowing wholesale to retailers under its cottage food law provided products remain properly labeled — confirm current wholesale scope directly with SCDA, as this claim came from a secondary aggregator rather than a directly rendered primary page.

Online sales

Yes

Delivery in state

Yes

Shipping out of state

South Carolina's Home-based Food Production Law does not permit interstate shipment of home-based food. SCDA's guidance states that home-based producers may sell direct to the consumer — including online and mail order — only with delivery within South Carolina; the law does not extend to sales delivered out of state.

The fine print

Statute

Originally enacted 2012, amended 2018 and 2022 (effective May 23, 2022); secondary sources report recodification at S.C. Code § 46-57-20 (Title 46, Chapter 57) following the 2024 SCDA/DHEC transfer — confirm exact current citation with SCDA, as this could not be verified against a directly rendered statute page.

Recent changes

Food-safety administration for this law transferred from DHEC to SCDA effective July 1, 2024 (Act 60, 2023).

Notes

Not confirmedSouth Carolina's own guidance document is co-published with Clemson University Extension and is the operative reference for allowed/prohibited foods and labeling — SCDA's website directs producers there rather than printing the full list itself. we could not fully render either the SCDA PDF guidance document or a state-code page as text (repeated binary/encoding failures on fetch), so several fields above are marked Unverified rather than filled from lower-confidence aggregator claims. No SC MEHKO/home-kitchen-restaurant pathway was identified.