Is It Legal to Sell Food from Home in the UK?

Yes, it is legal to sell food cooked in your own home in the UK. You must register your food business with your local council at least 28 days before you start trading, follow basic food hygiene standards, and label allergens correctly. There is no separate licence to apply for, no zoning approval needed, and council registration is free.

That's the short answer. The rest of this guide covers what counts as "selling food from home", the four things you must do to stay legal, what's not allowed, and the quickest path to being properly registered and trading.

Yes — selling home-cooked food is legal

UK food law treats your domestic kitchen as a food premises. You're permitted to prepare and sell food from it, as long as it meets the same hygiene standards expected of any commercial kitchen. There's no separate licence, no commercial space requirement, and no need for planning permission in most areas.

What you do need is to register, get inspected for a hygiene rating, handle allergens correctly, and carry the right insurance. That's the whole legal framework for most home cooks. Everything else — pricing, packaging, finding customers — is operational. For the full how-to, see the home food business pillar guide.

What "selling food from home" includes

The legal framework applies to anyone running a food business from a residential address, whether full-time or as a side hustle. That includes:

• Cooking meals for collection (lunches, dinners, weekend menus)
• Batch cooking and weekly meal-prep boxes
• Baking cakes, cookies, or breads to sell
• Running supper clubs from your home
• Selling at occasional markets, pop-ups, or street food events
• Catering small events from your home kitchen
• Cottage businesses — jams, sauces, baked goods sold online

The rules apply whether you sell once a month or every day, whether you're cooking £50 of food or £5,000. The threshold isn't volume — it's whether you're operating as a business. Selling for money on a recurring basis counts, even if your customers are currently just friends and family.

The four things you must do

1. Register with your local council

Free. Online. About 15 minutes via food.gov.uk. Must be at least 28 days before you start trading. Step-by-step guide to registering →

2. Get a food hygiene rating

Once registered, your council will inspect your kitchen and award a rating from 0 to 5. The visit is free. A 4 or 5 is the standard; anything below 3 is hard to recover from in the eyes of customers.

3. Label allergens correctly

UK law requires you to provide allergen information for the 14 major allergens. If you batch-cook and pack before the customer orders (PPDS food), Natasha's Law requires a full ingredient list with allergens emphasised on every pack. For made-to-order food, telling the customer is enough — but you still need to know what's in every dish.

4. Carry food liability insurance

Not strictly a legal requirement, but practically essential. Public-liability and product-liability cover from a food-trade broker runs £60–150 per year for the level most home cooks need. Your existing home insurance almost certainly excludes business activity, so relying on it is a gap that will be exposed the moment something goes wrong.

What's not allowed

Most home-cooked food is fine. The exceptions where you'll need additional permissions or to avoid the activity entirely:

• Raw milk and raw-milk cheeses — separate registration and stricter hygiene rules. Most home cooks won't go near these.
• Selling alcohol — needs a premises licence from your local authority, separate from food registration. Supper clubs that include wine need both.
• Operating without basic hygiene standards — councils can issue improvement notices, hygiene emergency prohibition notices, or in serious cases force closure.
• Trading before registration is complete — covered in the next section.

What happens if you sell food without registering

Trading without registration is a criminal offence under the Food Hygiene (England) Regulations and equivalents in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Councils take it seriously, and they do find unregistered home food businesses — usually through a customer complaint, a routine sweep of online platforms, or a tip-off from a competitor.

The realistic consequences:

• Improvement notice — stop trading until you register properly
• Fines up to £5,000 per offence
• Criminal prosecution for serious or repeated breaches
• The reputational hit — a public food hygiene enforcement record is hard to recover from, and customers Google you

Registration is free and the form is short. There is no upside to skipping it.

The fastest path to being properly legal

From a standing start, you can be fully registered, insured, and ready to trade in about four weeks:

• Day 1: Register with your council via food.gov.uk. The 28-day clock starts the moment you submit.
• Week 1: Book a £15–25 Level 2 Food Hygiene course online. Get insurance quotes from a food-trade broker.
• Week 2: Complete the course. Set up your kitchen for the inspection (separate boards for raw and cooked, sealed surfaces, fridge thermometer, written cleaning schedule).
• Week 3: Buy insurance. Build out your menu and ordering system. Photograph your dishes.
• Week 4: 28 days up. Soft-launch to friends and family. Start trading.

Your next step

If this was the part you were waiting on permission for: permission granted. Selling home-cooked food is legal, registration is free, and you can be trading in a month. The full how-to is in the home food business pillar guide; the registration form itself is walked through step-by-step in the council registration guide.