Allergens

The Allergens page holds the list of allergens your products can be declared against. It is a definition list, not a switch panel: nothing here changes what prints on a label on its own.

What prints on a label is what you selected on the product itself, in Products. This page only decides what is available to select.

The 14 Statutory Allergens

Every branch starts with the 14 allergens UK law requires to be declared. They are always there, cannot be removed, and are not renamed. As they appear in LabelFood:

Celery, Cereals containing gluten, Crustaceans, Eggs, Fish, Lupin, Milk, Molluscs, Mustard, Nuts, Peanuts, Sesame, Soya, Sulphur dioxide.

Two of these are shortened from the statutory wording: Soya is soybeans, and Sesame is sesame seeds. Sulphur dioxide covers sulphites above the declarable level.

Peanuts and nuts are separate entries in the law and must be declared separately. A peanut is a legume, not a tree nut.

Adding Your Own Allergen

If your kitchen handles something outside the 14 that customers ask about, such as kiwi, add it here:

1. Go to Settings → Allergens
2. Click Add allergen
3. Enter the name and save

It then appears alongside the others on the product form, and prints the same way. Anything you add can be removed again from the card’s menu. The 14 cannot.

The branch settings hold the same list as a Catalogue selector, under Settings → Organisation. There is no good reason to take a statutory allergen out of it, so manage the list from this page instead.

Per Branch

The list belongs to the branch selected in the sidebar. An allergen you add in one branch is not added to the others, so a site that handles something unusual can declare it without that showing up everywhere else.

Getting the Allergens onto Labels

1. Open the product in Products
2. Select every allergen it contains
3. For a sales product, type the full Ingredients list and wrap each allergen in **double asterisks** so it is emphasised on the label
4. Save, and the change reaches your devices on the next sync

To see the whole catalogue against the whole allergen list in one grid, and spot a product nobody has declared anything for, use Reports → Allergen Matrix.

The full walkthrough, including which label design carries a legal ingredients declaration, is in Setting Up Natasha’s Law Compliance.