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Our Food Manufacturer License post established that a Food Manufacturer License requires a commercial-grade facility — and that's usually the real cost of stepping up from cottage food. Here are three real paths people use to get there, each with a different tradeoff. 1. Build or convert your own space. The direct route: a dedicated, partitioned area or separate building meeting commercial standards. Full control, but the highest upfront cost. 2. Rent time in a shared-use (commissary) kitchen. An already-licensed commercial kitchen that rents out space and time to multiple small food businesses. Many producers bring their own equipment — including their own freeze dryer — rather than the facility providing it. You pay for access, not ownership. Texas has a growing number of these; searching "shared-use kitchen" or "commissary kitchen" near you is the place to start. 3. Use a toll processor (co-packing). You ship your raw product to a facility that handles the entire process for you — pre-freezing, freeze-drying, packaging — for a fee. No equipment or facility needed on your end at all. This only makes financial sense at real volume: some processors set minimums around 1,000 lbs per run, and pricing is typically quote-based rather than published. We haven't yet personally vetted specific Texas shared-use kitchens or toll processors to recommend by name — when we do, they'll be added to this post, vetted the same way we vet entries for Manufacturer Links.

Once you cross the $150,000 cottage food cap — or want to sell through channels cottage food doesn't cover — Texas requires a standard Food Manufacturer License from the Department of State Health Services (DSHS). The license fee itself is cheap. It's a sliding-scale fee based on your gross annual food sales, covering a 2-year license period: Under $10,000/year: $100 $10,000–$24,999: $150 $25,000–$99,999: $250 $100,000–$199,999: $560 $200,000–$999,999: $900 $1 million–$9.99 million: $1,120 $10 million+: $1,680 The real cost is usually the facility, not the fee. Texas does not allow licensed food manufacturing in any area used as living or sleeping quarters — your kitchen table doesn't qualify anymore. You'd need a space completely partitioned from the rest of your home (or a separate building) that meets commercial facility standards: dedicated handwashing stations, sealed doors and windows, surfaces that are easy to clean and moisture-resistant. DSHS inspects for this before issuing the license. For most people, building or renting that space costs far more than the license itself. What this license doesn't include: a private third-party safety certification. DSHS's inspection confirms your facility meets basic manufacturing standards — it's not the deeper, recurring audit (like SQF) that retail chains and big distributors often require before they'll carry your product. That's covered in our Food Safety section.