Restaurant allergen requirements in European Union
Allergens that must be declared in European Union
- Cereals containing gluten
- Crustaceans
- Eggs
- Fish
- Peanuts
- Soybeans
- Milk (incl. lactose)
- Tree nuts
- Celery
- Mustard
- Sesame seeds
- Sulphur dioxide and sulphites
- Lupin
- Molluscs
Source: EU Food Information for Consumers Regulation 1169/2011, Annex II.
What the rule actually requires
Regulation (EU) 1169/2011 requires that information about the fourteen listed allergens be available to the guest for food sold unpackaged — which is what a restaurant serves. The regulation does not mandate one particular format: member states set how the information is provided, and both written and verbal provision are used across the union. What is not optional is that the information exists, is accurate, and can be given at the point the guest asks.
The practical consequence for a menu is that “ask your server” only works if the server can actually answer. Where the answer lives in one person’s memory, it fails on their day off.
Why cross-border operators get caught out
The EU fourteen is one of the broader statutory lists in use, and it includes items several other jurisdictions do not: celery, mustard, lupin, molluscs and sulphites among them. A menu tagged against a narrower list and then served in the EU will look complete and be short.
This matters most for chains and for restaurants whose supplier recipes were written elsewhere. The allergen data has to be recorded against the strictest list you operate under, not the one the recipe came with.
Translation does not reduce the duty
Every language version of your menu carries the same obligation as the original. An allergen note that exists only in the local-language menu, and drops out of the English or German version a tourist actually reads, has not met the duty for that guest.
This is the core argument for holding allergens as structured data on the item rather than as sentences inside a description: the tag renders in every locale automatically, and a correction made once is correct everywhere.
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.