Restaurant allergen requirements in United Kingdom
Allergens that must be declared in United Kingdom
- Cereals containing gluten
- Crustaceans
- Eggs
- Fish
- Peanuts
- Soybeans
- Milk
- Tree nuts
- Celery
- Mustard
- Sesame seeds
- Sulphur dioxide and sulphites
- Lupin
- Molluscs
Source: Food Information Regulations 2014; "Natasha's Law" (Oct 2021) for pre-packed for direct sale.
Natasha’s Law and what it covers
The Food Information (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2019 — universally known as Natasha’s Law — took effect on 1 October 2021 and requires full ingredient listing with allergens emphasised on food that is prepacked for direct sale (PPDS). That is food packaged on the premises before a customer orders it: the sandwich in the chiller, the salad box on the counter.
It is a stricter standard than the one applying to food made to order, and it catches many operators who correctly assume their served dishes are handled differently. If you package anything ahead of the order, that item needs a full ingredient list, not just an allergen note.
The list is the EU fourteen
The UK retained the same fourteen allergens after leaving the EU, so a menu tagged for the EU is tagged correctly for the UK. The divergence is in the disclosure rules around PPDS rather than in which allergens count.
Where a group operates on both sides of the Channel, the allergen data can be shared; the packaging and labelling workflow cannot be assumed to transfer.
Written information is what survives a busy service
UK guidance places real weight on staff being able to give accurate allergen information. In practice, verbal-only systems degrade under pressure — new staff, agency cover, a Saturday night. A written source of truth that the floor team and the guest read from is the thing that holds.
A QR menu with per-item allergen filtering is one way to make that source of truth the same one the guest sees, which removes the transcription step where errors enter.
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.