Restaurant allergen requirements in Canada
Allergens that must be declared in Canada
- Eggs
- Milk
- Mustard
- Peanuts
- Crustaceans and molluscs
- Fish
- Sesame seeds
- Soy
- Sulphites
- Tree nuts
- Wheat and triticale
Source: Food and Drug Regulations B.01.010.1 — priority allergens.
Priority allergens, plus gluten sources and sulphites
Canada regulates a set of priority allergens under the Food and Drug Regulations, and pairs them with gluten sources and added sulphites as separately declarable categories. Mustard is a priority allergen in Canada — as it is in the EU, and as it is not in the United States.
For an operator running on both sides of the border, mustard is the field most likely to be missing from a US-built dataset.
Bilingual labelling is the norm
Canadian packaged food is labelled in both English and French, and guests in much of the country reasonably expect to be served in either language. In Quebec, French-language requirements are a matter of provincial law rather than convention.
A menu that carries allergen information in one language only is, in practice, serving half the room — which is the argument for holding allergen data as tags that render in whichever language the guest has selected.
Provincial rules sit on top of the federal ones
Food service is regulated provincially, so requirements for allergen training and menu disclosure vary across the country. The federal priority list tells you what to record; your province tells you what to display and who must be trained.
Record against the full list regardless — it is the same effort, and it means expanding into another province does not require redoing the work.
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.