If you are looking for a certified organic co-packer, the first thing worth knowing is that they are not spread evenly. We counted all 1,299 co-packers in our directory, every one of them flagged by the USDA as a certified organic co-packer. Almost half, 642, are in the West. California alone has 359, more than the whole Northeast and the whole South. Five places have none at all: Alaska, Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. Fifteen more states have between one and five.
That does not mean you are out of luck if you live far from California. It means you should search the right way for where you are. This post gives you the numbers, then four ways to use them.
How we counted
Every listing comes from the USDA Organic INTEGRITY Database, the public record of certified organic operations. We use its monthly download, this time the one from October 1, 2026. We keep United States operations whose certification and handling scope are both marked certified, and that USDA flags as a co-packer. That gives 1,299 listings in 46 states.
One thing to know before you read the state numbers. For 349 of the listings, all certified by Oregon Tilth, our directory has no plant address from USDA, so we list each at the address USDA gives, which may be a mailing address. A company's office and its plant are not always in the same place, so for these listings the state may not be where the food is made. Ask before you plan a visit.
The counts below are re-run by a script in our code, blog_numbers.py, so any number here can be checked.
By region
| Region | Co-packers | Share |
|---|---|---|
| West | 642 | 49% |
| Midwest | 258 | 20% |
| South | 213 | 16% |
| Northeast | 186 | 14% |
We group states into the four regions the US Census Bureau uses (the grouping is in common.py in our code). Within the West, the Pacific states (California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii) hold 534 listings on their own.
By state
The top three states, California, Washington and Oregon, hold 533 listings, 41% of the directory.
| State | Co-packers | State | Co-packers |
|---|---|---|---|
| California | 359 | Colorado | 29 |
| Washington | 106 | Minnesota | 25 |
| Oregon | 68 | North Carolina | 19 |
| New Jersey | 56 | Georgia | 18 |
| Pennsylvania | 55 | Indiana | 18 |
| Wisconsin | 54 | Virginia | 18 |
| Illinois | 52 | Arizona | 17 |
| Texas | 52 | Iowa | 17 |
| Florida | 50 | Idaho | 14 |
| New York | 49 | Nevada | 13 |
| Ohio | 35 | South Carolina | 12 |
| Michigan | 33 | Connecticut | 11 |
| Utah | 31 | Maryland | 11 |
Then come Tennessee (11), Arkansas, Missouri and Nebraska (8 each), Massachusetts (7) and Kentucky (5). Kansas and North Dakota have 4 each, and Mississippi has 3. Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wyoming have 2 each. Alabama, Hawaii and Louisiana have 1 each.
By product
A short list in your state matters less if none of them make what you make. So we also counted, for each of our 14 product groups, how many states have at least one co-packer in that group. A listing lands in a group when its own website, as we read it, or the certified products on its USDA record use words from that group (from the USDA list, at least two products have to match, or one on a short list). One listing can be in several groups.
| Product group | States with at least one |
|---|---|
| Spices, grains, and dry mixes | 36 |
| Meat and prepared meals | 34 |
| Beverages | 33 |
| Snacks and confections | 32 |
| Sauces and condiments | 28 |
| Supplements | 28 |
| Baked goods | 27 |
| Oils and vinegars | 27 |
| Coffee and tea | 26 |
| Dairy and plant-based | 26 |
| Frozen and desserts | 22 |
| Personal care | 21 |
| Pet food | 18 |
| Wine, beer, and spirits | 12 |
Dry goods are the easiest to find close to home. Wine, beer and spirits are the hardest: 12 states have one, so in most states there is no in-state option.
Four ways to use this
1. Start with your state, then widen to the region. Open your state page from the table above first. If it lists only a handful of co-packers, look at the neighboring states and the whole region before you give up. In New England, for example, the six states together have 26 listings, while no single one has more than 11.
2. If your state is thin, search by product instead of by place. A founder in Montana has no in-state listing to start from, so the useful question is not "who is near me" but "who makes my kind of product". Start from the product group in the table above and look at every state that has one.
3. Ask where the plant is. For the 349 Oregon Tilth listings, the state on the listing may be an office. It takes one email to ask, and it saves you a wasted trip.
4. Put distance on your list of questions, not at the top. A plant three states away that already makes your product type can be a better first call than a plant next door that does not. Ask each co-packer where it ships from, whether it receives your ingredients by truck or parcel, and who books the freight. Those answers, not the map, decide what distance really costs you.
What to do next
If you already know your product, the Fit Check reads every listing in the directory against what you make and shows the evidence for each one, wherever it is. Once you have a shortlist, keep it on your Sourcing Board and compare quotes side by side.
Sources
- USDA Organic INTEGRITY Database, monthly download of October 1, 2026, as imported into our directory. Every count above re-run with
python blog_numbers.pyon October 20, 2026.