Compliant labels for cottage food producers

B2BWebweekendNext.jsSupabasePDF generation

The idea

Every US state has a cottage food law, and every one words its labelling requirements differently: the disclaimer text, whether the home address must appear, minimum type sizes. Home bakers hand-make labels in Canva, get the wording wrong, and can be fined or shut down by a health department for it. They know this, which is why state cottage food Facebook groups relitigate label rules daily.

The wedge is the state-rules database, which is a moat made of tedious research rather than clever engineering, plus the allergen auto-detection that catches the butter-contains-milk cases people miss. Type your recipe, pick your state, print a sheet of labels that will survive an inspector.

Who pays

The producer pays 9 dollars a month or 49 a year, an easy spend for someone selling 300-dollar weekends at farmers markets under threat of shutdown. The audience is enormous and concentrated: cottage food Facebook groups count hundreds of thousands of members, and per-state SEO pages (‘Texas cottage food label requirements’) capture exactly the panicked search that precedes purchase. Yearly pricing suits a seasonal business.

MVP scope

  • Recipe entry with descending-weight ingredient statement and allergen auto-detection
  • State picker injecting the required disclaimer wording and rules from a data table
  • Print-ready PDFs for common Avery sheets plus PNG export
  • Per-state public requirements pages for SEO
  • Skip for v1: nutrition facts panels (a different regulatory beast), barcode generation, Canada/EU rules, inventory or order management
// Build prompt — paste into Cursor / Claude Code / Lovable / Bolt
Build LabelRight, a compliant-label generator for cottage food producers. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (auth and Postgres), client-or-server PDF generation sized to Avery label templates.

Core flow: a producer signs up, picks their US state, and enters their business details (name, address as their state requires it). They create a product by typing its recipe ingredients in descending order by weight; the app matches ingredients against a dictionary to auto-detect the nine FDA major allergens (milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, sesame), including derived matches (butter contains milk, flour contains wheat), with a manual override list. The generator then composes the label: product name, ingredient statement, contains-statement for detected allergens, net weight input, business info, and the state-mandated cottage food disclaimer text pulled from a states table (statute wording, required font-size minimums, and whether address or registration number is required all live in that table as data, not code). Output is a print-ready PDF laid out for common Avery sheets (5160, 8163, 22806 round) and a single-label PNG for thermal printers.

Pages: /products (list), /products/[id]/edit (recipe and detected allergens), /labels/[id] (layout picker, live preview, download), /settings (state, business info), plus a public per-state requirements page (/states/[state]) for SEO.

Implementation details: keep the states table versioned with an updated-at date shown on every label screen, since producers need to trust the wording is current.

Pricing: 9 dollars/month or 49/year. Free tier: one product, watermarked preview.

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