Restaurant allergen requirements in Australia
Allergens that must be declared in Australia
- Cereals containing gluten
- Crustaceans
- Eggs
- Fish
- Peanuts
- Soybeans
- Milk
- Tree nuts
- Sesame seeds
- Sulphites
- Lupin
- Molluscs
Source: FSANZ Food Standards Code 1.2.3 (PEAL labelling).
PEAL and plain-English naming
Australia and New Zealand share the FSANZ Food Standards Code, and Standard 1.2.3 sets the allergen requirements. The Plain English Allergen Labelling (PEAL) amendments require specified allergens to be declared using prescribed plain-English terms in a defined format, rather than technical or trade names.
The point is that a guest should not need food-science vocabulary to recognise a risk. “Milk” rather than a dairy derivative’s chemical name; “wheat” rather than a flour trade term.
Where the Australian list differs
The set is close to the EU fourteen but not identical, and the differences are the ones that catch importers and franchise operators working from overseas recipe data. Check the list on this page against the dataset you hold rather than assuming a European or American tagging exercise transfers.
A tourism market with a translation problem
Australian hospitality serves a high proportion of international visitors, many reading the menu in a second language. An allergen system that only works in English is not serving the guests most likely to be harmed by getting it wrong.
Allergen tags held as structured data render in every language you publish; allergen information written into an English description does not survive translation reliably.
How Intermenu helps
Allergen tags are recorded once per menu item as structured data and render in every language you publish, so a guest filtering for an allergen gets the same answer whichever version of the menu they are reading. Nothing is inferred silently — the operator sees the mapping at upload time.