Help · Scoring
How we publish state outlook bands
We replaced our raw regulatory number with three outlook bands — Advantaged, Workable, and Limited. This page explains what each band means and why we made the change.
What the three bands mean
Cottage food laws here favor home-based sellers — high or no revenue caps, broad allowed-product lists, simple permits, and often online sales. A good environment to start or expand into.
You can run a real cottage food business here, but you will hit one or two meaningful constraints — a moderate revenue cap, training requirement, permit fee, or sales-channel limit. Plan around the constraint that affects you most.
The state imposes restrictions that materially limit a home-kitchen operation — low caps, narrow product categories, kitchen inspection, or a permit gauntlet. Worth a deeper compliance review before committing.
How public signals work
The compliance dashboard, multi-state tracker, expansion planner, and regulatory forecast now show one of the three bands above instead of fine-grained internal analysis.
The change keeps the underlying decision useful — most members were already reading the score as “good enough” / “watch out” / “don’t start here yet” — while protecting the proprietary scoring model that powers our signal bands, comparisons, and forecasts.
If you need finer-grained analysis for a specific state, the Expansion Planner breaks each state down by revenue cap, training/permit cost, online sales, inspection, restrictions, and labeling — every factor that drives the band.
How the bands are decided
Bands roll up the same factors you see on each state report card and in the Expansion Planner: revenue caps, allowed product categories, sales-channel rules, online and interstate sales, training and permit requirements, inspection requirements, and labeling rules.
We refresh the underlying data when state legislatures pass new bills or amend existing ones. The Regulatory Forecast flags states whose band is likely to shift in the next 6-24 months based on legislative momentum and neighbor patterns.
Still have questions?
Email [email protected]. Include your state and the screen you were looking at, and we’ll walk you through the band you’re seeing and what to do next.