If you want to sell food online in the UK, the legal side is simpler and cheaper than most people expect. Registering as a food business with your council is free, can’t be refused, and there’s no licence to buy. What actually trips up new sellers is allergen law — specifically the rule that allergen information must be available at two separate points when you sell at a distance — and working out which of three different labelling regimes applies to what you make. This guide covers the whole route from home kitchen to first orders, and every legal claim in it was checked against gov.uk and food.gov.uk guidance on 7 August 2026. Rules change; if you’re reading this much later, verify against the originals.
One scope note: this is the food-specific layer. The general business admin — sole trader vs limited company, telling HMRC, business bank accounts — is covered in our guide to registering a business to sell online in the UK, and the store-building side lives in our pillar guide to starting an online store in the UK.
Can you legally sell food made in your home kitchen?
Yes. There is no rule against running a food business from a domestic kitchen in the UK, and thousands of registered food businesses operate from home. Your local authority will inspect your home kitchen to check your preparation areas and procedures are suitable — the same hygiene standards apply as to any commercial premises, scaled to what you do.
Before you start, gov.uk’s guidance flags three unglamorous checks: get permission from your mortgage provider or landlord if you rent, sort appropriate insurance (product and public liability at minimum — your home contents policy won’t cover a business), and understand the tax side. None of these are food-specific hurdles, but skipping the landlord conversation in particular can end a food business from home in the UK faster than any inspector.
Step one: register your food business with your council — free, 28 days before trading
This is the bit almost everyone overcomplicates. If you supply food to the public regularly — paid or free — you must register as a food business with your local authority at least 28 days before you start trading. Registration is free, it cannot be refused, and you do it once per premises through the food business registration portal on food.gov.uk (it takes minutes). There’s no exam, no fee, no approval hearing.
Two warnings. First, it’s a legal requirement: trading without registering is an offence and can mean a fine. Second, the FSA actually recommends you don’t register too early — wait until you’re about 28 days from genuinely being ready, because registering starts the clock towards your inspection.
The inspection and your food hygiene rating
After you register, an environmental health officer will visit — unannounced — to inspect. They look at your premises, how you handle food, and your safety management paperwork; they are not judging whether your brownies taste good. Lower-risk businesses can wait several months for a first inspection, so don’t panic if nothing happens immediately.
The visit produces your Food Hygiene Rating Scheme score from 0 to 5. The FSA’s own line is that every business should be able to achieve a 5 — it measures hygiene and process, not size or fanciness, and plenty of home kitchens hold 5s. Displaying the sticker is legally required in Wales and Northern Ireland and voluntary (but encouraged) in England; the FSA has been working towards making online display mandatory too. Either way, put your rating on your website voluntarily. For a food seller no one has heard of, a visible 5 is one of the strongest trust signals you can show next to a buy button.
Training and HACCP: what inspectors actually expect
A food hygiene certificate is not legally compulsory — but before you close the tab, the same gov.uk guidance says you must be able to demonstrate you’ve been adequately trained in food hygiene, and recommends pursuing a qualification. In practice, the standard way to demonstrate it is a Level 2 Food Hygiene certificate: done online in a few hours, cheap, and it removes an awkward conversation with your inspector. Just do it.
You also need a written food safety management system based on HACCP principles — identifying where things could go wrong (cross-contamination, temperature, pests, cleaning) and what you do about it. For a small business this is not a consultancy project: the FSA’s Safer Food, Better Business pack is a fill-in-the-blanks HACCP-based system designed for exactly this, and it’s free. Complete it, keep your daily records honestly, and you’ve satisfied the requirement most new sellers fear most.
Allergen rules when you sell food online: the two-point rule
This is the section to read twice, because it’s where online food sellers most often get it wrong — and where the consequences are most serious.
UK law requires you to declare 14 allergens wherever they’re used as ingredients: celery, cereals containing gluten (wheat, rye, barley, oats), crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, sulphur dioxide/sulphites above 10 parts per million, and tree nuts.
When you sell food at a distance — online, by phone, for delivery or post — allergen information must be available at two points:
- Before the purchase is completed. The customer must be able to see allergen information before they order. FSA best practice for websites: put it on the product page itself, or at most one click away with a clear link. Buried in a PDF or “email us to ask” does not cut it.
- At the moment of delivery. Written allergen information must arrive with the food — a label or sticker on the packaging, or an enclosed sheet — so the person eating it (who may not be the person who ordered it) can check before eating.
Both points, every order, every product. This is also a genuine platform-selection criterion: however you build your store, you need allergen information cleanly on every product page, not hidden behind an accordion three taps deep.
Natasha’s Law, PPDS and which label your food actually needs
UK labelling law splits food into regimes depending on when you pack it and how you sell it — and posting food and selling it at a market can put the same brownie under different rules. Here’s the map:
| How you sell it | What it counts as | What you must do |
|---|---|---|
| Made or packed after the customer orders, then posted or delivered | Distance selling (non-prepacked) | Allergen info before purchase and in writing at delivery — the two-point rule. A full ingredients label isn’t legally required, but including one is good practice. |
| Packed before order, sold face to face by you — market stall, your doorstep, a fair | PPDS — “prepacked for direct sale” (Natasha’s Law) | Label on the pack with the name of the food and a full ingredients list with the 14 allergens emphasised (bold, for instance). |
| Packed before order and sold anywhere other than where it was packed — for example stocked by a local shop or café | Prepacked food | Full labelling: name, complete ingredients list in descending weight order with allergens emphasised, net quantity, best before or use by date, storage conditions, any warnings, and a business name and UK address. |
| Prepacked food (jars, sealed packs made in advance) sold through your website | Prepacked + distance selling | Full prepacked label on the product, and allergen information still available online before purchase. |
Two details worth knowing. Natasha’s Law (the PPDS rules, in force since 2021) technically doesn’t apply to distance selling — but the two-point allergen rule applies instead, so there is no route where allergen information is optional. And since 1 January 2024, prepacked food sold in Great Britain must carry a UK address for the food business — your name and address goes on the label, which for home producers is a privacy point to think through before you print 500 stickers.
What to make — and what to leave until later
The practical divide for online food is ambient versus chilled. Shelf-stable products — brownies and traybakes, biscuits, fudge, granola, preserves, chutneys, spice blends, coffee — survive 48 hours in the post in normal packaging. Food that needs refrigeration must be kept cool in transport, which means insulated boxes, ice packs, faster (pricier) delivery services and a real risk of melted margins. Start ambient; earn your way into chilled.
If you only ever sell direct to consumers, registration is normally all you need. If you plan to supply other businesses with products containing meat, fish or dairy, speak to your council’s environmental health team first — a separate approval regime exists for that, and it’s a much bigger step than registration.
Pricing, VAT and the chocolate-biscuit trap
You don’t charge VAT at all until your taxable turnover passes £90,000 in a rolling 12 months, which at typical first-year food volumes is a distant problem. But it’s worth knowing the shape of it now, because VAT on food is gloriously weird: most food for human consumption is zero-rated, while confectionery — including biscuits wholly or partly covered in chocolate and most sweetened items eaten with the fingers — is standard-rated at 20%. A plain biscuit and its chocolate-dipped twin sit in different tax regimes. If you’re choosing between product lines with ambitions of scale, that 20% eventually matters; our guide to UK VAT for online sellers goes deeper.
On pricing itself: cost every order fully — ingredients, packaging, the label you now know you need, postage, and your time at a real hourly rate — then add margin. Food sellers chronically underprice because ingredients look cheap; it’s the box, the postage and the hour of packing that quietly eat the profit.
Packaging and postage for food
Food packaging has to do three jobs: survive the network (crush-resistant, leak-proof), keep the food legal (labels attached, allergen sheet enclosed), and arrive looking like a treat rather than a forensic sample. Letterbox-format packaging — the flat brownie box that fits through the door — is popular for a reason: no missed-delivery card, no squashed corner, and cheaper postage bands. For the actual carrier decision — Royal Mail versus couriers, size bands, what tracking costs — see our full comparison of Royal Mail vs couriers for UK shipping. Note that distance sales also fall under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, so get your delivery and returns information stated clearly before checkout.
Where to sell food online in the UK
Sell from your own store first. For food this isn’t just the usual margin argument: allergen law makes your product pages a compliance surface, and on your own site you control exactly where ingredient and allergen information sits — on the page, styled clearly, one click from anywhere. You also keep the customer relationship, which matters enormously for a repeat-purchase product like food.
Full disclosure: we build Orbit Commerce, so weigh this recommendation accordingly — but the setup is genuinely suited to food. The Solo plan is £25/month (£19/month billed yearly) with unlimited products, a drag-and-drop page builder that makes a proper allergen section on every product page a ten-minute job, and UK card rates of 2% + 25p with no platform fee on sales. When you’re ready for marketplaces, the Amazon, eBay and Etsy plugins are free on every plan, with stock synced and marketplace orders arriving as native orders — useful once you’re juggling a bake schedule against orders from three places.
And don’t skip local: farmers’ markets, food fairs and local delivery within a few miles are where food businesses from home usually take their first money — face to face, no postage risk, instant feedback.
Your first 10 orders
- Sell to your own network — properly. Announce with a real order link, not a “coming soon”. Friends buying at full price and reviewing honestly are worth ten Instagram followers.
- Book one local market. Use it as a paid sampling exercise: every bag gets a card with a QR code to your store and a discount code so you can count who came back.
- Post in local Facebook groups. Local food does disproportionately well there; one good photo of a real bake outperforms anything corporate.
- Offer local delivery or collection. A free-delivery radius removes postage anxiety for your earliest, most local customers.
- Put your hygiene rating and allergen pages front and centre. For an unknown food brand, visible compliance is marketing.
- Build a gift angle. A letterbox brownie box with a gift note field roughly doubles your addressable buyers — people who’ll never treat themselves will happily post cake to someone else.
- Take pre-orders for a weekly bake day. Batching orders to one or two days keeps a food business from home sane and your ingredients fresh.
Questions people ask us about selling food online in the UK
Do I need a licence to sell food from home in the UK?
No licence — but you must register as a food business with your local council at least 28 days before you start trading. Registration is free and can’t be refused, and trading unregistered is an offence. Separate approval is only needed for certain activities, such as supplying other businesses with meat, fish or dairy products.
Do I need a food hygiene certificate to sell food online?
It’s not legally compulsory, but you must be able to demonstrate you’ve been adequately trained in food hygiene, and gov.uk recommends a qualification. A Level 2 Food Hygiene certificate — a few hours online — is the standard way to satisfy your inspector, alongside a HACCP-based system like the FSA’s free Safer Food, Better Business pack.
Do I have to label allergens if I make food to order?
Yes — just not with a Natasha’s Law pack label. For made-to-order food sold at a distance, allergen information must be available before the purchase is completed (on or one click from the product page) and in writing when the food is delivered. Natasha’s Law full-ingredient labels apply when you pack food before it’s ordered and sell it face to face.
Do I have to charge VAT on food I sell online?
Not until your taxable turnover passes £90,000 in a rolling 12 months. Even then, most food is zero-rated — though confectionery, including chocolate-covered biscuits, is standard-rated at 20%, so product choice can affect your eventual VAT position.
Register first, then build
The honest summary: register with your council (free, 28 days ahead), do the Level 2 course, fill in Safer Food Better Business, and get allergen information onto every product page and into every parcel. That’s the whole compliance core — everything after that is cooking and selling. If you want the store side handled while you handle the food, start a free 14-day Orbit trial — no card needed, and you can have allergen-complete product pages live before your registration window is even up.