David Crabill

I’m not a labeling specialist, so this advice just comes from what I do know. I don’t necessarily know the best way to accomplish this, but here are some ideas:

1. Ingredients must be ordered by weight, and my guess is that the weight of cinnamon that you are infusing is quite small. If your ingredient list is such that it’s obvious that the cinnamon amount would be the last ingredient, then you don’t need to know the exact weight.
2. If you want to know the weight of cinnamon that gets transferred, something you could do is weigh the cinnamon stick before putting it in the pot, and then fully dehydrate it and weigh it again. This could be a very small amount so you’d probably need a scale that’s accurate to at least a milligram.
3. One thing that the labeling rules allow you to do is list insignificant ingredients out of order. You do this at the end of your ingredient list by saying “Contains 2% or less of cinnamon…” http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?fr=101.4

Generally labels need to be attached in some way to the item you’re selling. If you look at the back of a Snickers bar, you can see that it’s possible to stick a lot of legible info on a pretty small package. But you can also get creative, like using a tag label that hangs off your product.

If you really need the label to be separate, you can ask your ag or health dept for approval, which they might not grant. One of the primary purposes of a label is so those depts can use the product’s packaging to track the source of a product if a customer complains.

Most states allow separate labels on large items that aren’t packaged, like wedding cakes.

The limit isn’t actively regulated, but a health or ag dept could shut down an operation if it was clear that they were making too much. I’d say it’s more self-regulated, in that people know if they make more than $15K then they’re doing something illegal. That limitation is baked right into Florida’s law, so an amendment to the law would need to be passed for it to change.

Each state with a law has their own version, and many states don’t call it a cottage food law. This site is going to be your best bet if you want an updated list of the states that allow some form of homemade food sales. I don’t know of any other updated list that exists. Please know that the map doesn’t necessarily show states that have laws; it shows states that allow people to sell homemade food in some form, and that form is usually defined by a law. http://forrager.com/laws/

You wouldn’t be using this cottage food law for that kind of business. I’m not sure what you need, but your health dept should know.

As far as I know, owning a smoothie shop will require you to setup a commercial kitchen, with inspections from the health dept. As long as you’re going to do all of that, you might as well also use it for making your dried fruit. I don’t think your shop can sell homemade goods.