What Artisan and Small Batch Mean on a US Label

In US law, “artisan”, “small batch”, “hand-harvested”, “craft”, “gourmet” and “premium” have no defined meaning. No FDA, USDA or FTC rule sets a threshold for any of them. A short list of label words does carry a precise federal meaning — organic (USDA), Made in USA (FTC) and natural flavor (FDA) — while plain “natural” sits in between, governed by an FDA policy rather than a regulation.

Which words on a US food label are actually defined?

Fewer than the packaging suggests. A handful of words have a rule behind them, an agency that owns the rule, and a test a product either passes or fails. The rest is language no agency has written down.

The table sorts the words you are most likely to meet on a salt or seasoning label by what, legally, each obliges the seller to have done.

Organic has a rulebook, and salt is written out of it

The USDA organic regulations set four labelling tiers. “100 percent organic” means every ingredient is organically produced. “Organic” means at least 95 per cent. “Made with organic” means at least 70 per cent. Below that, organic ingredients may only be named in the ingredient list.

Every one of those percentages is calculated, in the regulation’s own words, “excluding water and salt.” Salt does not count towards the total because it is a mineral, not an agricultural product. So a jar of plain salt cannot be USDA organic, and a seasoning blend that is organic got there on its herbs and garlic, not on its salt. We have covered the consequences, and Europe’s rather different route, in our piece on organic salt.

Organic is the clearest example of what a defined word looks like: a number, a calculation method and an accredited certifier. Hold every other word on the label up against that.

Made in USA means “all or virtually all”

The FTC’s Made in USA Labeling Rule, 16 CFR Part 323, was published in July 2021. It makes an unqualified US-origin claim on a label unlawful unless three things are true: the final assembly or processing happens in the US, all significant processing happens in the US, and “all or virtually all ingredients or components of the product are made and sourced in the United States.” The rule covers the words “made”, “manufactured”, “built”, “produced”, “created” and “crafted” in the US, not just the famous phrase.

On 13 March 2026 an executive order, EO 14392, directed the FTC to prioritise enforcement against false “Made in America” claims. It was published in the Federal Register on 18 March. The rule has not changed; the attention has.

For a single-ingredient product the arithmetic is short. If the salt was evaporated abroad, the only ingredient is foreign, and no amount of grinding, grading or packing in the US makes it “virtually all” American. The FTC allows qualified claims that state the extent of domestic content. Separately, US Customs requires imported articles to be marked with their country of origin, and when goods are repacked in the US the importer must certify that the marking will not be concealed or that the new container will be properly marked.

Our salt comes from the Chubut coast of Argentina. There is no version of the rule under which it becomes American, and we would not want one.

Natural flavor is defined. Natural is not.

This is the pair people most often get backwards, and reasonably so: the longer phrase sounds vaguer.

“Natural flavor” has a regulation. Under 21 CFR 101.22(a)(3) it means an essential oil, oleoresin, essence, extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis whose flavouring constituents come from a listed class of sources: spice, fruit, vegetable, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy, or fermentation products of those. The same section lets a manufacturer declare it on the ingredient list simply as “natural flavor”. So the definition tells you the family a substance came from. It does not tell you which substance, and the label does not have to either. Smoke is its own corner of this, covered in our smoked salt pieces.

“Natural” on its own has only a policy. The FDA has long considered it to mean that “nothing artificial or synthetic (including all color additives regardless of source) has been included in, or has been added to, a food that would not normally be expected to be in that food.” The agency says plainly that this was never established by rulemaking, and that it was not meant to address production or processing methods. It asked for public comment on defining the word in 2015. The comment period closed on 10 May 2016. No definition has followed, and the FDA’s page on the subject was last updated in 2018.

The USDA, by contrast, does define “natural” for meat and poultry: no artificial ingredient or added colour, minimally processed, and an explanatory statement on the label. Salt is not meat.

On our reading of the FDA policy, virtually every salt without an added artificial ingredient is “natural”. A salt dissolved, purified and recrystallised under vacuum qualifies on the same terms as one that was never washed. The word cannot tell vacuum salt from sea salt, which is the one distinction a salt buyer usually wants it to make.

Two statements the law does require on salt

Salt has one piece of wording that is compulsory rather than optional. Under 21 CFR 100.155, table salt must carry either “This salt supplies iodide, a necessary nutrient” or “This salt does not supply iodide, a necessary nutrient,” immediately after the product name. That is a disclosure, not a recommendation, and we have written separately about what it is for.

The other is “gluten-free”, which the FDA defined in 2013: any unavoidable gluten must be below 20 ppm, and a food that inherently contains no gluten may use the claim. Plain salt is inherently gluten-free. The claim is true on every jar of salt in the country, which is exactly why it tells you nothing about the one in your hand.

The words nobody defined

Artisan, small batch, hand-harvested, handmade, craft, gourmet, premium. None of them has a federal definition. There is no batch size below which salt becomes “small batch”, no share of manual labour that makes it “hand-harvested”, no grade that makes it “premium”, and no one who certifies any of them.

“Craft” is the instructive near-miss. In beer, the Brewers Association publishes its own definition of a craft brewer, with a production ceiling and an ownership test. That is a trade association’s membership rule, not law, and it does not extend to salt.

“Sea salt” belongs on the list too. The US has no standard of identity for it. The international Codex standard for food-grade salt accepts salt from the sea, rock or brine without defining sea salt as a category. Argentina is one of the few places that has, with a mineral floor attached, which is the subject of our piece on the 2024 law.

Undefined does not mean anything goes

An undefined word is still covered by the general rule. The FTC’s position is that advertising must be truthful and not deceptive, and that advertisers must have evidence for their claims. What varies is how seriously a word is taken.

The FTC’s 1983 Deception Policy Statement says the Commission generally will not pursue “obviously exaggerated or puffing representations, i.e., those that the ordinary consumers do not take seriously,” nor subjective claims about taste, feel, appearance or smell. “Gourmet” and “premium” live there. They are opinions about the product, and the law treats them as such.

“Hand-harvested” reads differently, because it sounds like a statement of fact about a method. Whether it would be treated as one is less settled than it looks. In 2015 two federal courts dismissed class actions over the word “handmade” on Maker’s Mark bourbon: Salters v. Beam Suntory in the Northern District of Florida in May, and Nowrouzi v. Maker’s Mark in the Southern District of California in July. The California court held that “handmade” cannot reasonably be read as meaning literally by hand.

That cuts both ways. A word elastic enough to be legally safe is too elastic to be informative. None of this is a secret loophole. It is the ordinary state of the law, and it is why these words are everywhere.

What we do with these words

We do not print “artisan”, “small batch”, “hand-harvested”, “gourmet” or “premium” about our salt. Not because they are unlawful — they are not — but because we could not show you the evidence behind them, and a word we cannot evidence is one we would rather not use. What we can document is the country, the coast, and, once our own independent laboratory analysis is complete, the composition. That is a shorter list than the adjectives would make. It has the advantage of being checkable.

This is a reading of the federal rules, not legal advice. States add their own conditions — California has its own Made in USA statute, for one — and we have not surveyed them. The two “handmade” decisions are federal district court rulings, not appellate law, and we have relied on published legal commentary for their reasoning rather than the full opinions.