Selling honey in Texas
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Texas gives beekeepers their own exemption rather than treating honey as a cottage food. That distinction sounds academic and it decides three practical things: what you may print on the label, where you may sell, and whose door the inspector knocks on.
The exemption, and what it costs you
Under S.B. 1766, a beekeeper producing less than 2,500 pounds a year, roughly 200 gallons, from hives they own and manage in Texas is exempt from Department of State Health Services licensing as a food manufacturer.
The exemption is narrow about where you sell. Direct to the consumer only: your own home, a farmers market, a farm stand, or a municipal, county or nonprofit fair, festival or event. It does not cover wholesale and it does not cover selling over the internet. A single wholesale order or one online sale takes you outside it, and the exemption is not partial.
What has to be on the jar
The ordinary three, then one more that is specific to operating under the exemption:
- the name of the product
- a net weight statement
- the name and address of the business
- “Bottled or packaged in a facility not inspected by the Texas Department of State Health Services”
Separately, and recommended rather than required, the infant warning: “Do not feed honey to infants under one year of age.” It is on most jars for a reason and there is no argument for leaving it off.
The address problem, and why the usual workaround does not apply
Texas cottage food operators may register with DSHS and print a registration number on the label instead of a physical home address. It is a genuinely useful provision for someone selling from a home kitchen, and beekeepers hear about it and assume it covers them.
It does not. Honey is not baked, canned, dehydrated or processed; it is a raw agricultural commodity, and that is the reason beekeepers were given a separate exemption rather than being folded into the cottage food rules. Operating under the beekeeper exemption, the label carries the name and address of the business, and for a beekeeper working from home that is a home address handed to everyone who buys a jar.
The way out is a business address that is not your house, not a labeling trick. A post office box is not universally accepted for this, so settle it before you print a thousand labels rather than after.
When you fall out of the exemption
Three things end it: crossing 2,500 pounds, selling wholesale, or selling online. Any one of them puts you under DSHS licensing as a food manufacturer, with the inspection and the facility requirements that implies.
This is worth knowing before you scale rather than after, because the first wholesale account is usually the thing that ends the exemption, and it tends to arrive as an opportunity rather than as a decision.