Selling Cheese in Michigan

I live in Michigan, I have been making cheese for about thirty years, and at some point most people in that position wonder what it would take to sell a wheel legally. I went and found out.

The answer is shorter and harder than I expected, and it turns on one fact that almost nobody volunteers: Michigan’s Cottage Food Law does not reach cheese, at any volume. Not “up to a limit” — at all.

I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. MDARD is the authority; talk to them before you do anything.

🔴 Cottage food is the wrong door, and it is not close

Michigan’s Cottage Food Law exempts a cottage food operation from the licensing and inspection provisions of the Michigan Food Law. It is a genuinely useful on-ramp — it is how people sell jam and cookies and dry mixes from a home kitchen without building a commercial plant — and it is the first thing anybody suggests.

It does not apply here, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of which list you are on. The exemption covers “certain non-potentially hazardous foods that do not require time and/or temperature control for safety.” Cheese is a temperature-controlled-for-safety food. It is excluded by the definition of the scheme, not by a line item in a schedule.

⭐ And you can see how firm that boundary is from how far out MDARD draws it. The cottage food rules do not merely decline to let you sell cheese — under baked goods they specifically disallow “breads with soft cheese or large chunks of hard cheeses.” You cannot sell a cheese bread from a home kitchen here. The cheese does not have to be the product for the door to close.

⚠ So the annual sales cap that dominates every cottage-food discussion is irrelevant to a cheesemaker. It is not that you may sell a little cheese and then need a licence. You may sell none.

Other constraints of the scheme, for completeness, since they matter if you sell anything else alongside: cottage food products must be sold directly to the end consumer, may be sold by internet or mail order or third-party delivery only if the customer can interact with you directly before the sale, and may only be sold or delivered within Michigan.

The door that does exist: a licensed dairy plant

Cheese for sale in Michigan is a manufacturing dairy activity, governed by the Manufacturing Milk Law of 2001 (the companion to the Grade “A” Milk Law of 2001, which has been amended to adopt the 2017 federal Pasteurized Milk Ordinance). MDARD’s Food and Dairy Division administers both.

A manufacturing dairy plant is the facility that processes milk into products like cheese and ice cream, and that is the licence category a commercial cheesemaker needs. Separately, if you want to sell raw milk for processing into manufacturing milk products, you need a Manufacturing Dairy Farm permit — regardless of the size of the farm. There is no smallholder carve-out on that side either.

⚠ I am deliberately not printing a fee schedule, a plan-review checklist or a list of required finishes. Those change, MDARD publishes the current versions, and a page like this going stale is worse than a page that sends you to the source. The structural facts are what I am confident of: it is a licensed plant, it is inspected, and it is a different order of commitment from a cottage-food stall.

What that actually means for a home maker

Plainly: making cheese at home in Michigan is unrestricted, and selling it is a business decision with a plant attached.

I can make anything I like in my basement. I can serve it to anyone who comes to the house. I can give wheels away. None of that touches the dairy laws, because they bite on sale.

The gap between that and a licensed plant is not a paperwork gap, it is a capital gap — which is the real reason so many excellent home cheesemakers never sell. It is also why the practical route for most people is not “get licensed” but shared or rented licensed space, which is the subject of selling at scale.

Raw milk, which is the other Michigan question

Separate rules, and stricter than the cheese ones.

Selling raw milk is illegal in Michigan — no retail, no farm-gate sale. A 2012 state task-force policy permits you to consume unpasteurised milk from a cow you own, outright or through a herdshare: you pay a farmer to board, care for and milk the animal, and as a shareholder you obtain — but do not purchase — the milk. That distinction is the entire legal architecture, and it carries conditions: a signed, dated written contract; established communication between farmer and shareholder; and milk from a single farm, not comingled.

Two things follow that I find genuinely interesting. Herdshares are not licensed, so the state has no idea how many exist — MDARD says as much. And the area is live: Michigan lawmakers were considering changes to the raw-milk laws as recently as March 2026, so this paragraph may date.

⭐ The cheese question is separate and federal, and it is more permissive than the milk question: a raw-milk cheese aged 60 days at ≥35 °F is legal here exactly as it is everywhere else in the United States, under the part 133 exception. Michigan being strict about raw milk does not make raw-milk cheese a Michigan problem.

Sources

MDARD, Michigan Cottage Foods information — scheme scope (“non-potentially hazardous foods that do not require time and/or temperature control for safety”), direct-to-consumer and in-state-only limits, and the baked-goods exclusions for soft cheese and large chunks of hard cheese.
MDARD, Michigan’s Dairy Laws — Manufacturing Milk Law of 2001; Grade “A” Milk Law of 2001 as amended to adopt the 2017 federal PMO.
MDARD, Dairy Manufacturing Plant and Dairy Manufacturing Producer program pages.
Michigan raw-milk / herdshare policy as set out in The Raw-Milk Wars.