Raw-Milk Law

There are two separate questions about raw milk and cheese, and almost every argument I have read collapses them into one.

The first is does the rule work — is sixty days actually enough to make a raw-milk cheese safe? That one I have written about at length in The Raw-Milk Wars, it is genuinely unsettled, and the evidence cuts against both camps.

This page is the other question, which has a much tidier answer: what am I actually allowed to do?

I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. Verify against your own state before you sell anything.

The federal architecture, in three pieces

One. 21 CFR 1240.61 — issued in 1987, implementing a court order in Public Citizen v. Heckler, so it arrived through litigation rather than agency initiative — provides that no one may deliver into interstate commerce any milk or milk product in final package form for direct human consumption that has not been pasteurised.

Two. That same regulation carves out products covered by “alternative procedures to pasteurization … provided for by regulation, such as in part 133 of this chapter for curing of certain cheese varieties.”

Three. The alternative procedure, promulgated in 1950, lives inside the individual cheese standards. From the cheddar standard, 21 CFR 133.113, verbatim: “If the dairy ingredients used are not pasteurized, the cheese is cured at a temperature of not less than 35 °F for at least 60 days.”

⭐ So the “60-day rule” is not a raw-milk policy at all. It is the single door left open inside a pasteurisation mandate, and it is written not in one place but repeated through the composition standards for each variety. That is why it is so easy to find people arguing about it who have never located the text: there is no section called “the sixty-day rule.”

🔴 The federal rule stops at the state line, and that is where the real variation is

This is the piece that most summaries get wrong by omission, and it is the practically important one.

The FDA declined to extend the prohibition to intrastate sales — it was not necessary in order to make the interstate ban work. So:

• Interstate, the position is uniform. Raw-milk cheese aged 60 days at ≥35 °F, labelled as unpasteurised, may cross state lines. Under 60 days, it may not, anywhere, full stop.
• Intrastate, it is up to the state. Some states do permit sale of raw-milk cheese younger than 60 days, typically through direct farm sales or farmers’ markets, and some do not permit raw dairy sales in any form.

⚠ Which means the sentence “raw-milk cheese under 60 days is illegal in America” is true for anything that moves between states and not reliably true within one. If you have read that flat claim — I had, repeatedly — it is a federal rule being reported as if it were the whole picture.

⚠ And the inverse error is just as common: a state permitting young raw-milk cheese does not create a right to ship it. The moment it crosses a line, 1240.61 applies again.

In Michigan, where I am, the answer is the strict one, and I have set out the mechanism — the herdshare architecture, the fact that herdshares are unlicensed so nobody knows how many exist, and the March 2026 legislative activity — on the Michigan page and in the Raw-Milk Wars. The short version: raw milk may not be sold here at all, while raw-milk cheese aged past 60 days is legal here exactly as it is everywhere else, under the part 133 exception.

What this blocks at the border

The rule is also why a serious cheese counter in the United States has holes in it that a French one does not.

Any raw-milk cheese whose identity depends on being eaten young simply cannot be imported. That takes out a great deal of the soft-ripened world in its authentic form — the young lactic-set cheeses, the fresh raw-milk rounds — and it is why so many famous names arrive here as a pasteurised version made to satisfy a different regulation than the one the cheese was designed around.

⭐ It also explains a thing that used to puzzle me: why some imported cheeses taste older than the same cheese eaten in Europe. They are older. They have to be.

⚠ The exceptions are not all what they look like. Camembert AOP is still a raw-milk cheese under the French specification — the widely reported 2018 “peace deal” allowing pasteurised milk into the AOP is not in force. So the pasteurised camembert-shaped object in an American supermarket is generally not AOP Camembert de Normandie at all. It is a different product wearing a similar name, which loops straight back to protected names.

🔴 Aging is not a safety switch, and the rule quietly implies otherwise

I will not re-run the whole argument here, but one point belongs on the operational page too, because it changes behaviour rather than opinion.

The 60-day threshold rests on decades-old work showing that Brucella abortus is eliminated in cheddar over that period. Against Brucella, in the 1940s, the number was reasonable. The pathogens that matter now behave differently — 1960s challenge studies found Salmonella Typhi surviving in stirred-curd granular cheddar for 150 to 180 days, two to three times the legal minimum.

So: do not treat sixty days as a sanitising step. It is a legal permission, and the safety of a raw-milk cheese is decided by the health of the herd, the cleanliness of the milking, the acid curve and the salt — not by the calendar. That is the same conclusion the make pages reach from the other direction, and it is the one thing on this page I would want a beginner to take away.

Sources

• 21 CFR 1240.61 (mandatory pasteurization for milk and milk products in interstate commerce); Public Citizen v. Heckler.
• 21 CFR Part 133, e.g. §133.113 (cheddar) — the 60-day / 35 °F curing alternative.
• FDA’s decision not to extend the prohibition to intrastate sales; state-by-state variation in raw-dairy rules.
• Challenge-study and Brucella material as cited in The Raw-Milk Wars.