Adding a Product

This guide shows how to add a product to your catalogue, what each field does, and the faster ways to get a whole menu in at once.

Your catalogue lives in the cloud dashboard and belongs to your whole organisation, so a product you add reaches every paired device unless you limit it to one branch. It arrives on the next sync, which runs every few minutes.

Prep or Sales

Every product is one of two types, and the choice decides which fields you are asked for and which label it prints:

• Prep: food you make and store in your own kitchen. Prints a prep label with the use-by date, the storage location and the defrost guide.
• Sales: food you sell to a customer in a pack. Prints a sales label, which is the one Natasha’s Law covers, so it carries the ingredients, the allergen summary and the price.

You can switch a product between the two at any time in the dashboard. On the device the type is fixed, because the fields a sales label needs are not all available there.

Adding a Product in the Dashboard

1. Sign in at office.labelfood.co.uk and check the right branch is selected in the sidebar
2. Go to Products
3. Click the + button and choose New product
4. At the top of the form, set Prep or Sales, and leave it on Active
5. Fill in the fields below
6. Click Save product

If you run more than one branch, a third control appears next to those two and lets you keep the product to a single branch instead of the whole organisation.

The Fields

• Product name: what prints on the label. The counter beside it shows how much the label can set, around 25 characters on a prep label and around 48 on a sales label
• Description: an internal note. It only prints on the sales designs that include a description
• Category: required. Groups the product so staff can find it on the device
• Allergens: everything the product contains. This is what the label declares
• Ingredients, sales only: the full list, heaviest first. Wrap an allergen in **double asterisks** to emphasise it on the label, for example Sugar, **Wheat** Flour, Salt
• Storage location: where the item is kept. Prints on prep labels
• Storage instructions: free text, for example Keep refrigerated at 0 to 4°C
• Defrost guide, prep only: hours and instructions. Prints under the allergen line, and the label shows a DE-FROSTED flag
• Expiry after: shelf life, typed as a number and a unit: 6h, 3d, 2w. The device works the use-by date out from this at the moment of printing
• Price or Cost: the selling price on a sales product, the cost price on a prep one
• Barcode: optional. Lets staff scan the item instead of searching for it
• Nutrition and other label fields, sales only: energy, fat, salt and the rest, plus net quantity and origin. These are what the UK compliant design prints

Prep products have two extra cards below the form: a Prep guide for the steps, and a Recipe for what one batch is made of.

Two things save typing on a new product. Suggestions offers names already used elsewhere in your catalogue and fills in the expiry and allergens that normally go with them. AI takes a photo of the packaging and reads the name, barcode, ingredients, allergens and nutrition off it. Both fill the form only: nothing is saved until you have checked it and pressed Save product.

If a product with the same name already exists, the form says so and still lets you save, because two sites can genuinely make the same thing differently.

Adding Many Products at Once

The + button offers three more routes, all for Owners and Managers:

• Bulk add: a row-by-row form, for typing in a handful of products quickly
• Import products: upload an .xlsx file, or send photos and PDFs of your menu and let AI read them. Either way you review the list and confirm before anything is saved
• Export all products: download your catalogue as an Excel file. Edit it and upload it again to update in bulk

Adding a Product on the Device

Staff can add a product without leaving the kitchen:

1. On the device, open the Product tab
2. Tap +
3. Fill in the name, category, allergens, storage location, expiry and, where it applies, the price and ingredients
4. Tap the camera to attach a photo if it helps whoever reviews it
5. Tap Save for Approval

The request reaches the dashboard under Requests, where an Owner or Manager opens it, changes anything that needs changing and approves or rejects it. Once approved, the product reaches every device on the next sync.

If you would rather skip that review, turn on Auto-approve product changes in the branch settings, under Settings → Organisation. The device button then reads Save Product and the product goes live straight away. It is the right setting for a single-site kitchen where the person on the device is the person who would be approving it, and the wrong one where you want a second pair of eyes on an allergen list.

Editing a Product

1. Go to Products and open the product
2. Click Edit
3. Make your changes and click Save product

On the device, a manager or owner editing a shared product is told the change applies to every device after the next sync. A staff member editing one sends it for approval instead, exactly like a new product.

Changes only affect labels printed from then on. Anything already printed and on the shelf keeps the allergens and the use-by date it was printed with, which is the behaviour your records depend on.

Taking a Product Out of Use

Switch it to Inactive rather than deleting it. The product disappears from the device and cannot be printed, while everything already printed from it stays in your reports. Deleting is available to Owners, but it is worth keeping anything that has ever been printed.

The 14 UK Allergens

The 14 allergens that must be declared in the UK are set out in Annex II of Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, retained in UK law and enforced in England by the Food Information Regulations 2014. Natasha’s Law extended these requirements to PPDS food.

All 14 are set up for every new organisation, so this is the list you select from when adding a product. Where the name in LabelFood is shorter than the statutory wording, it is given in brackets.

1. Cereals containing gluten: wheat (including spelt and khorasan), rye, barley, oats and hybridised strains
2. Crustaceans: prawns, crab, lobster, crayfish
3. Eggs
4. Fish
5. Peanuts
6. Soybeans (in LabelFood: Soya)
7. Milk, including lactose
8. Nuts: almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, cashews, pecan nuts, Brazil nuts, pistachio nuts, macadamia or Queensland nuts
9. Celery, including celeriac
10. Mustard
11. Sesame seeds (in LabelFood: Sesame)
12. Sulphur dioxide and sulphites (in LabelFood: Sulphur dioxide), above 10 mg/kg or 10 mg/litre, expressed as total SO₂
13. Lupin
14. Molluscs: mussels, squid, oysters, snails

The law also covers products made from each of these, not just the ingredient itself.

Peanuts and nuts are two separate entries in the legislation and must be declared separately. A peanut is a legume, not a tree nut, and someone allergic to one may not react to the other. Never record peanuts as a type of nut.

Adding Your Own Allergen

The 14 statutory allergens are always there and cannot be removed. If your kitchen handles something else people ask about, such as kiwi, you can add it:

1. Go to Settings → Allergens
2. Click Add allergen and give it a name

It then appears alongside the others when you edit a product, and prints on the label the same way. Anything you add yourself can be removed again; the 14 cannot.