Food safety and hygiene

Packaging, labelling and allergies

Packaging and labelling

The Food Standards Agency provides guidance on how food businesses should package and label prepacked and non-prepacked food.

Allergies

Customers with a food allergy or food intolerance need to know which foods they can eat safely. If given the wrong information, the consequences could be serious as they could become very ill or even die.

All food business operators selling unwrapped and unlabelled food need to make allergen information available to their customers (including food bought in restaurants, cafes, takeaways, sandwich bars, deli counters and salad bars).

The Food Standards Agency provides allergen guidance for food businesses.

Allergen types

There are currently 14 recognised food allergens:

• Peanuts (also called groundnuts or monkey nuts)
• Nuts (almond, hazelnut, walnut, cashew, pecan, Brazil, pistachio, macadamia and Queensland nut)
• Fish
• Eggs
• Crustaceans (e.g. crab, lobster, langoustine, prawn or shrimp)
• Sesame seeds
• Milk
• Soybeans
• Celery (including celeriac)
• Mustard
• Lupin
• Molluscs (e.g. squid, octopus, mussels, cockles, periwinkles or snails)
• Cereals containing gluten (e.g. wheat, rye, barley, oats, spelt and kamut)
• Added sulphur dioxide and sulphites at a level above 10 mg/kg (often used as a preservative for dried fruit and found in drinks)

Although oats are technically gluten-free, they are often processed in the same mills as wheat, rye or barley and can become contaminated as a result. These are considered to be ‘dirty oats’ for anyone with a gluten intolerance. Only ‘clean oats’ are considered to be gluten-free, and these are processed in separate mills to the other cereals. If your products contain oats, label anything with oats as contaminated with gluten unless you can state they are from a clean mill.

Dealing with allergens

It's essential that food business operators know the ingredients in the foods they sell and whether these include any of these allergens.

There should be an agreed way to deal with customer requests and your staff will need to know this. All staff should be made aware of this information and receive training on handling allergy information requests.

Last updated 11 July 2023