Cottage food law in Texas
Texas cottage food law (Health & Safety Code ch. 437, as rewritten by SB 541, eff. 9/1/2025). $150,000/year cap (inflation-indexed); no permit, license, inspection, or state fee — refrigerated foods legal with a DSHS registration.
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Texas porch baking carries a map of where people came from. Charlotte Panadería bakes a little of Mexico onto the table, mother and daughter, out near San Antonio. Heartbakn Bakery & Catering NB TX turns out German artisan loaves in New Braunfels. The Bronze Lotus folds Venezuelan bread and slow-fermented sourdough together in San Antonio, and Ti Amann | French Bakery makes kouign-amann from a pastry chef raised in Bretagne, now baking in Austin. Filipino ube cakes, Peruvian dessert jars, Desi fusion sweets, Pacific Islands bites out of North Texas: a lot of these kitchens are baking the food they grew up eating, for neighbors who want it close.
Underneath that runs a deep bench of sourdough. Fresh-milled and long-fermented loaves, weekly preorders, porch pickups, and farm stands on a Saturday morning. The porches spread across the whole state instead of piling into a single metro. Houston and Austin carry the most, San Antonio and Dallas close behind, then Katy, Fort Worth, San Marcos, and Laredo, with small towns from El Paso to Tyler holding a baker or two apiece. Cottage food laws are what let neighbors sell this kind of home baking at all.
Every porch shop here keys to its own city. Pick the metro nearest you, find the baker whose bread or cake you actually want, order direct, and pick it up at the porch. Most take preorders by the week and post their drop times, so message early. Run a porch shop in Texas? It is always free to list.