Food & Beverage Made in Louisville

Louisville is better known for what it serves than what it packages. The Hot Brown, the Derby, and the headquarters of Yum! Brands and Papa John's get the attention. Behind them is a manufacturing base that makes sauces for national restaurant chains, pretzels by the truckload, food coloring, candy, soy sauce and beer. This page covers the makers of packaged food and drinks listed below. Distilled spirits are on their own page, bourbon and spirits. For the restaurant-chain side of the city's food economy, see Startup Louisville's pieces on Yum! Brands and agtech and foodtech startups.

A Short History of Making Food in Louisville

Beer before bourbon tourism

Long before bourbon tourism, Louisville was a beer town. German immigrants brought their brewing traditions in the 1800s. Frank Fehr started brewing in 1872 near what is now NuLu, and Oertel's, which began as a bottling plant on Story Avenue in Butchertown, was brewing its own beer by 1865, according to the Frazier History Museum. The Falls City Brewing Company was organized in 1905 by local tavern and grocery owners. It got through Prohibition by selling ice and soft drinks as the Falls City Ice and Beverage Company and kept brewing until 1978. When Falls City closed, Louisville's pre-Prohibition brewing industry was gone.

Craft brewing brought it back. A 2020 presentation by the Kentucky Guild of Brewers to state legislators counted 25 breweries in Louisville, compared with 14 in Lexington.

Candy, pie and trademarks

Some of the city's best-known foods are small manufacturing businesses. Muth's Candies opened on East Market Street in 1921 and still makes the Modjeska, a caramel-covered marshmallow named for the Polish actress Helena Modjeska, who performed in Louisville in 1883. Muth's got the original recipe from the Busath family, whose candy shop invented it.

Kern's Kitchen's Derby-Pie is a good lesson for food founders about brand protection. The family created the chocolate-nut pie at the Melrose Inn in Prospect around 1950, trademarked the name, and has defended it in court for decades, as NPR reported. That is why restaurants around town sell a "chocolate nut pie" instead.

Industrial food ingredients

Louisville also makes ingredients most people never see. D.D. Williamson, a caramel-color maker founded in 1865, was headquartered in Louisville when Givaudan acquired it in 2021. On November 12, 2024, an explosion at the Givaudan Sense Colour plant in the Clifton neighborhood killed two workers and injured 11 people. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board said a runaway reaction in a caramel-color reactor was the likely cause and called the plant "a catastrophe waiting to happen." The plant has since been demolished. For anyone scaling up a cooked or reacted product, the lesson is that process safety needs as much engineering as the recipe.

What's Made Here Today

The sector covers a wide range of company sizes:

• Large plants. Stellar Snacks opened a $137 million pretzel bakery in November 2024 in a 434,000-square-foot building at 1391 Dixie Highway, the former Black Leaf site in the West End. It plans to create 350 jobs over a decade. In 2021, House Foods America announced a $146.3 million tofu plant in the Riverport industrial park, with 109 jobs planned.
• Custom and private-label manufacturing. Paradise Tomato Kitchens makes custom tomato- and pepper-based sauces for restaurant chains and food companies from its Louisville plant. Companies like this are how a regional recipe can end up on a national menu without the brand owner building a factory.
• Specialty brands. Bourbon Barrel Foods started as what it calls the country's first soy sauce microbrewery. It ages its soy sauce in used bourbon barrels and also makes Worcestershire sauce, smoked salts and spices. Its products show how the bourbon supply chain's byproducts end up in other categories.
• Breweries, coffee roasters and bakeries. These make up most of the companies in the directory below. Most sell direct or through local grocery and restaurant accounts.

Supply Chain and Workforce

Food plants hire from the same pool of maintenance technicians and line workers as the region's logistics, auto and distilling employers.

Louisville's main supply-chain advantage is shipping. GLI notes the region is within a day's drive of two-thirds of the U.S. population, and UPS Worldport at the airport handles small-parcel shipping. Startup Louisville's article on why Louisville is America's logistics capital covers the details. Packaging, ingredient distributors, cold storage and third-party warehousing are all available locally, and Kentucky's farm economy supplies grain, soybeans, sorghum and livestock. For finding a manufacturing partner, see our guide to Louisville co-packers and contract manufacturers.

How a New Food Maker Gets Started

Food is one of the easier physical products to start and one of the harder ones to scale, because the rules change as you grow.

Step 1: Start at home, if your product qualifies

Kentucky's House Bill 468 (2019) set up two home tiers:

• Home-based processors can make lower-risk foods like baked goods, jams and jellies at home. They register each year with the state Food Safety Branch for a $50 fee, and no inspection or training is required to start.
• Home-based microprocessors can make higher-risk items, such as acidified foods like pickles, salsas and some sauces. They must complete a workshop and get each recipe approved. University of Kentucky Cooperative Extension runs the training.

Check current product lists and sales channels with the Food Safety Branch before you launch, because some products and channels are excluded from both tiers.

Step 2: Move into a commercial kitchen

When you outgrow home production or want to sell wholesale, you need a permitted space. Chef Space, run by the nonprofit Community Ventures, opened in 2015 in a former cafeteria at 1812 West Muhammad Ali Boulevard in the Russell neighborhood. It rents shared commercial kitchen time to caterers, food trucks, bakers and wholesale producers, and adds training and access to capital. By 2019 it had helped launch about 80 businesses.

Step 3: Get the right permit

Under KRS 217.125, a food processing or storage plant needs a state permit before it operates. Manufacturers that sell mainly wholesale or online are permitted and inspected by the Kentucky Food Safety Branch, and the annual fee depends on square footage and risk level. Retail operations that do less than 25% wholesale fall under retail food rules instead. The state's commercial food manufacturing starter guide explains the process. Most commercial food facilities must also register with the FDA.

Breweries follow alcohol rules instead. You need a federal Brewer's Notice from the TTB and a license from the Kentucky ABC.

Step 4: Validate, label and scale

The University of Kentucky's Food Systems Innovation Center helps small producers with shelf-life and safety validation, nutrition facts panels, and training such as HACCP and Better Process Control School, which acidified and canned food makers need. When volume justifies it, a co-packer or your own plant is the next step. Our guide to manufacturing a product in Louisville and the state incentive programs cover that stage. Once you're producing, get listed in the directory.

Where to See It

• Muth's Candies on East Market Street, where Modjeskas are still made and sold.
• Bourbon Barrel Foods, which runs tastings of its barrel-aged soy sauce and seasonings.
• The Louisville Ale Trail, a brewery passport program launched in 2020.

Browse the food and beverage makers below, or see related listings in bourbon and spirits and prototyping and contract manufacturing.