Registering a Food Business in the UK: What Small Producers Must Do

If you sell food, you almost certainly need to register

There's a persistent myth that you can sell a bit of homemade food — cakes for the school fair, jam at the market, brownies through an Instagram shop — without telling anyone official. For anything beyond genuine one-off charity sales, that's wrong. If you're selling food on a regular basis, you are running a food business, and UK law requires you to register it with your local authority.

The good news: registration is free, it can't be refused, and the process is straightforward. The catch most people miss is the timing — you must register at least 28 days before you start trading. This guide walks through who needs to register, when, how, and what comes after.

Who counts as a "food business"

The threshold is lower than most new makers expect. According to the Food Standards Agency (FSA), you need to register if you sell food regularly and as an organised activity — and that explicitly includes selling through online channels, not just from a shop.

The FSA is clear that you must register whether you:

Trade from a physical, customer-facing premises (a shop, stall, or unit)
Sell food via social media — for example a Facebook Marketplace or Instagram store
Sell via e-commerce sites such as Amazon or eBay
Run your business in other ways, including from your own home kitchen

So a baker shipping sourdough through Etsy, a chutney maker selling at farmers markets, and someone running a cake business from their home kitchen all need to register. Working from home doesn't exempt you — a home kitchen used for a food business is itself the food premises that gets registered.

What's usually not caught: genuinely occasional, non-profit sales — for instance, making cakes for a charity event a few times a year. If you're unsure where your activity falls, your local authority's environmental health team will tell you; it's better to ask than to assume.

The 28-day rule — and why not to register too early

This is the part that trips people up. You must register at least 28 days before you start trading, and not registering is an offence.

But there's a less obvious point in the FSA guidance: don't register too early either. The recommendation is to register 28 days before you're actually ready to start operating — not months in advance while you're still developing recipes or deciding whether the business is viable. Registering puts you on the local authority's books for inspection, so the sensible window is once you're genuinely about to trade.

In practice: pick your launch date, count back 28 days, and register then.

How to register (and what it costs)

Registration is done with the local authority where your business is based — for a home business, that's the council covering your home. You can register through the FSA's online food business registration service, which routes you to the right local authority.

Key facts:

It's free. There is no registration fee.
It can't be refused. Registration is a notification, not an application you can fail. The authority simply needs to know you exist so they can include you in their inspection programme.
You'll need basic details: your name and the business name, the type of food activity (e.g. baking, preserving, confectionery), and the address of the premises — including a home address if you operate from home.

Once registered, your local authority may arrange a visit from an environmental health officer. This isn't something to fear — for a small, well-organised producer it's usually a constructive conversation about your processes and records.

What inspectors look at — and the Food Hygiene Rating

When an environmental health officer visits, they assess how you handle, prepare, and store food, your cleaning and hygiene practices, and the management systems behind them. Many businesses are then given a Food Hygiene Rating (the 0–5 sticker scheme you see in shop windows; the scheme operates slightly differently in Scotland and Wales).

Two things make these visits go smoothly:

A food safety management system. The FSA's free Safer Food, Better Business (SFBB) pack is designed exactly for small businesses and walks you through safe methods and the daily diary inspectors expect to see. There's no need to buy a bespoke system to start.
Records you can produce on request. Traceability and allergen information are the records most likely to be asked for.

Traceability: keeping "one step back, one step forward"

UK food law requires food businesses to keep traceability records under retained Regulation (EC) No 178/2002. The principle is "one step back, one step forward": you must be able to identify who supplied your ingredients, and (for business customers) who you supplied your products to.

For a small producer this means recording, per production batch, what you made, what went into it, and where it went. If a supplier flags a problem with an ingredient, you can identify exactly which of your products are affected. Our guide to batch tracking for small UK food producers covers how to set this up without software, and ingredient inventory management covers keeping the supplier-lot side current.

Allergens: the 14 you must declare

Separately from registration, you have ongoing allergen duties. Under the Food Information Regulations 2014, food businesses must tell customers if any of 14 named allergens are used as ingredients.

The 14 regulated allergens are: celery; cereals containing gluten (such as wheat, rye, barley and oats); crustaceans; eggs; fish; lupin; milk; molluscs; mustard; peanuts; sesame; soybeans; sulphur dioxide and sulphites (above 10 parts per million); and tree nuts (such as almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, brazil nuts, cashews, pecans, pistachios and macadamia nuts).

Natasha's Law (PPDS). Since 1 October 2021, food that is prepacked for direct sale (PPDS) — food you pack on the same premises before a customer orders it, such as the brownies you wrap and label for a market stall or the granola you bag for an Etsy order — must carry a full ingredients list with the 14 allergens emphasised within it. This requirement was introduced by an amendment to the Food Information Regulations and is enforced by the FSA and local authorities. If you make food, build allergen status into your records from day one — tag each ingredient when you first buy it, not when you come to write a label.

A simple registration checklist

Confirm you're a food business (selling regularly, including online or from home)
Pick your launch date and count back 28 days
Register with your local authority via the FSA service — it's free and can't be refused
Start a Safer Food, Better Business (or equivalent) food safety record from day one
Set up batch/traceability records — one step back, one step forward
Tag every ingredient with its allergen status; prepare PPDS labels if you prepack
Keep records accessible for an environmental health visit

The practical takeaway

Registering a food business in the UK is one of the easiest pieces of compliance you'll do — free, un-refusable, and online — provided you do it on time. The work that actually matters starts after: a basic food safety system, traceability records, and accurate allergen information. Get those habits in from your first batch and an inspection becomes a five-minute conversation rather than a scramble.

This guide is general information for UK small food producers, not legal advice. Rules differ slightly between England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. For your specific situation, contact your local authority's environmental health team or refer to FSA guidance on registering a food business.