UK allergen labelling basics for food venues

If you serve food in the UK, allergen information is not optional. The law requires you to provide accurate details about the 14 regulated allergens — and guests increasingly expect to find that information before they order, not after they ask.

This guide covers what those allergens are, where venues commonly go wrong, and how to present the information clearly on a digital menu.

The 14 regulated allergens

Under UK food information law (carried over from EU Regulation 1169/2011), you must declare if any of these are used as ingredients:

1. Cereals containing gluten — wheat, rye, barley, oats and their hybridised strains
2. Crustaceans — prawns, crab, lobster and similar
3. Eggs
4. Fish
5. Peanuts
6. Soybeans
7. Milk — including lactose
8. Tree nuts — almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, cashews, pecans, Brazil nuts, pistachios, macadamia nuts
9. Celery
10. Mustard
11. Sesame
12. Sulphur dioxide and sulphites — at concentrations above 10 mg/kg or 10 mg/litre
13. Lupin
14. Molluscs — mussels, oysters, squid and similar

These apply to prepacked food, non-prepacked food (including meals served in restaurants) and food sold loose.

Where venues get it wrong

The most common mistakes are not malicious — they are operational:

• Recipe drift — a chef substitutes an ingredient but the menu is not updated
• Hidden allergens — stock, paste, spice blends or garnishes that contain allergens the team forgot to track
• Cross-contact confusion — "may contain" warnings missing or inconsistent
• Custom dietary needs — guests ask about coriander, MSG or pea protein, which are not in the regulated 14 but still matter

Quiteful tracks all 14 regulated allergens by default, and supports custom allergens for anything else your kitchen needs to flag.

Paper menus vs digital filters

A PDF or printed menu can list allergens in a table at the back. Guests with multiple allergies still have to read every dish line by line.

A live digital menu can offer filters — tap "no gluten" and "no dairy" and see only what is safe to order. That is a better guest experience and a clearer audit trail for your team.

AI ingredient checks can also help catch allergens hidden in recipe text before a dish goes live.

May-contain and cross-contact

Regulated allergens cover deliberate ingredients. Many venues also need to communicate cross-contact risk — fryers shared with gluten, boards used for nuts, and so on.

Be consistent. If one dish says "may contain traces of nuts" and a similar dish says nothing, guests reasonably assume the second dish is safe. Structured menu data makes it easier to apply warnings consistently across your range.

PPDS and prepacked food

If you sell prepacked food for direct sale (PPDS) — sandwiches, salads, cakes in packaging — labelling rules are stricter. You need a full ingredients list with allergens emphasised.

Coming soon: Quiteful will generate labels from the same recipe data that powers your live menu, so you are not maintaining allergen information in three separate places.

What good looks like

A strong allergen setup for a venue menu:

• Every dish linked to structured ingredient data
• All 14 allergens checked at recipe level, not guessed per service
• Clear filters on the guest-facing menu
• Custom allergens for your kitchen's specific needs
• Updates that propagate instantly when a supplier changes a product

Allergen compliance is not a one-off project. It is part of how you run the menu day to day.

Start with your bestsellers

You do not need to fix every legacy dish on day one. Begin with your top twenty sellers — the dishes most guests order and most likely to cause problems if wrong. Build accurate recipe data there first, then expand.

Explore custom allergen support in Quiteful, or see how nutrition and allergen data work together on the same live menu.