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Guide — Allergen Compliance

UK Allergen Law: What It Actually Requires Of Your Kitchen

Not Natasha's Law — that's for pre-packaged food. This is the law that governs every UK restaurant, cafe and pub serving food to a customer, whether it's plated, packaged, or handed over the counter.

Kitchen Control · Guides

The law, in plain terms

The Food Information Regulations 2014 (FIR) enforce the retained EU rules on food information — commonly referred to as the "FIC" — which require every UK food business to declare any of 14 major allergens present in the food they serve. This applies to non-prepacked food (a meal cooked and served to a table), prepacked food, and food packaged on-site for direct sale. In practice: if you cook it and someone eats it, this law applies to you.

It came into force in December 2014 and it's not optional guidance — it's enforced by your local authority, usually via Environmental Health, and non-compliance can lead to an improvement notice and, in some cases, prosecution.

Does this apply to you?
✓You cook or prepare food that a customer eats on-site or takes away
✓You run a restaurant, cafe, pub, takeaway, or catering business
✓You serve food at events, pop-ups, or markets

If any of these are true, this law applies to you today — regardless of whether you package or pre-wrap anything.

The 14 allergens

These must be declared whenever present as an ingredient, including in additives, processing aids, and anything used in a stock, sauce, or garnish — not just the obvious main ingredient.

FSA REGULATED ALLERGENS — 14 TOTAL
What you're declaring
Celery — inc. celeriac, stock cubes
Cereals w/ gluten — wheat, rye, barley, oats
Crustaceans — prawns, crab, lobster
Eggs
Fish
Lupin
Milk
Molluscs — mussels, oysters
Mustard
Peanuts
Sesame
Soybeans
Sulphur dioxide/sulphites — over 10ppm
Tree nuts — almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, etc.

How you're allowed to provide it

The FSA gives you three acceptable routes, and you can choose whichever fits how your kitchen runs:

1. Written up front — allergens marked directly on the menu or menu board, so a customer sees the information without asking.

2. Signposted to written information — a note on the menu pointing to an allergen matrix or folder available on request.

3. Signposted to verbal information — a note telling the customer to ask a member of staff, provided that staff member gives accurate, consistent answers backed by something written.

Where kitchens get caught out Verbal-only answers are technically allowed, but the FSA is explicit that they need to be backed up by accurate written information behind the scenes — not memory. The most common compliance failure isn't a missing menu note, it's a staff member giving a confident, wrong answer because the allergen data lived in someone's head rather than somewhere checkable. A supplier changing an ingredient without anyone updating the sheet is the other repeat offender.

What good practice actually looks like

In practice, most independent kitchens land on a combination: allergens marked or flagged on the menu for common ones, plus a written allergen matrix — a simple grid of dishes against the 14 allergens — kept up to date and available the moment a customer or an EHO asks for it. The matrix only stays useful if it's rebuilt every time a recipe or supplier changes, which is where most manual, spreadsheet-based versions quietly go out of date.

Where Kitchen Control fits

Kitchen Control's allergen management tracks the 14 allergens against every ingredient and recipe, so the information updates automatically when an ingredient changes rather than relying on someone remembering to update a separate sheet. It also prints proper food labels — including PPDS-style allergen labels for anything sold prepacked — straight from that same ingredient data. See the label printing guide for how that works.

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