The 14 UK allergens: a working list for café and restaurant operators

At Harbourside one Tuesday in late spring, an EHO officer asked our duty manager to talk her through the allergens in our chorizo and butterbean stew. Easy one, we thought. Then she pointed at the sourdough on the side and asked which flour mix the baker used. Our matrix said wheat only. The baker had quietly switched to a multigrain blend eight months earlier that contained sesame and soya. Nobody told us. We never checked.

We weren't fined, but we got a stern conversation and a follow-up visit. The lesson was not that we were careless people. It was that allergen compliance is not a one-off bit of paperwork. It is an ongoing relationship with your suppliers, your kitchen, and the staff taking orders on a Saturday brunch shift.

This guide walks through all 14 UK allergens, what they hide in, and what an inspector or, worse, a customer in A&E, would actually need you to know.

Why this matters

Allergen law in the UK sits under the Food Information Regulations 2014, which lifted the 14 allergens out of the wider EU framework and made it a criminal offence to provide misleading information about them. If someone with a peanut allergy eats your brownie and ends up in hospital because your matrix said "no nuts" and the supplier had changed recipe, that is on you. Not the supplier. You.

The Food Standards Agency and your local council EHO take this seriously, and so do customers. The number of people I have had ask "is there celery in this?" went up tenfold between 2015 and 2024. People know their allergens now. They expect you to know yours.

And since 2021 we have had Natasha's Law on top, which changed how pre-packed food for direct sale (PPDS) has to be labelled. More on that at the end.

The 14 allergens, with the gotchas

Here is the working list. I have written one practical sentence per allergen, the kind I wish someone had stuck on our prep room wall in 2010.

• Celery: shows up in stocks, soups, ready-made stuffing mixes, and cheap bouillon powder, so even a "plain" tomato soup can contain it.
• Cereals containing gluten: wheat, rye, barley, oats, spelt, kamut. Watch for soy sauce (wheat), beer batters, dusted chips, and sausages bulked with rusk.
• Crustaceans: prawns, crab, lobster, langoustine. The gotcha is fish sauce and some Asian pastes that contain shrimp.
• Eggs: obvious in mayo and brioche, less obvious in glazes on pastry, fresh pasta, and some lager finings.
• Fish: anchovies hiding in Worcestershire sauce and Caesar dressing are the classic trap.
• Lupin: a legume used in some flours and gluten-free baking, often imported. Rare in British kitchens but check any GF mix.
• Milk: dairy is everywhere. Ghee, casein, whey, lactose. Watch for milk powder in "plain" crisps and some breads.
• Molluscs: mussels, oysters, squid, octopus, snails. Oyster sauce is the giveaway in stir-fries.
• Mustard: hidden in salad dressings, marinades, pickles, and most commercial mayonnaise. We caught ours out with a balsamic glaze once.
• Peanuts: a legume, not a tree nut. Satay, some Asian sauces, and cheap chocolate bars are the obvious spots.
• Sesame: seeds on burger buns, tahini in hummus, and increasingly in artisan bread blends (see our Harbourside story).
• Soybeans: soy sauce, edamame, tofu, miso, but also vegetable oils labelled as "vegetable oil" and some bread improvers.
• Sulphur dioxide and sulphites (above 10mg/kg): dried fruit, wine, cider, some fruit juices, and most commercial vinegars.
• Tree nuts: almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, cashews, pecans, pistachios, brazils, macadamias, and Queensland nuts. Pesto, marzipan, and praline are common hiding places.

If you serve any kind of breakfast, brunch, or sandwich menu, you will be dealing with at least ten of these every single day.

"Contains" versus "may contain"

This is where a lot of operators get sloppy, and where we did too in the early years at Welsh Back.

"Contains" means the allergen is a deliberate ingredient. If you put walnuts in a salad, the salad contains walnuts. Simple.

"May contain" is for cross-contamination risk where the allergen is not an ingredient but could realistically end up in the food because of how it is produced or handled. A bakery that makes both walnut bread and white bloomers in the same kitchen might label the white bloomer "may contain nuts" because flour dust travels.

The trap is using "may contain" as a lazy disclaimer. Slapping "may contain nuts" on your whole menu does not protect you. If a customer asks for something with no nuts and you serve them a dish with cashew pesto, "may contain nuts" on the menu will not save you in court. The law expects you to give accurate, specific information. Blanket disclaimers look like, and are, hedging.

The other trap is the opposite: missing a real cross-contamination risk because you forgot. If you fry chips in the same oil as breaded scampi, that is a contamination risk you need to flag. Customers with severe shellfish allergies need to know.

Why front-of-house need this as much as the kitchen

The kitchen builds the matrix. The front-of-house team uses it under pressure. That is the bit that goes wrong.

A customer at table 12 mentions a sesame allergy to the runner taking dessert orders. The runner is 19, has been with you three weeks, and is in the weeds. The kitchen made the brownie this morning with tahini in the ganache because the head chef was experimenting. Has anyone told the runner? Is the matrix updated? Does the runner know to check the matrix before saying "yes that's fine"?

At our cafés, we eventually settled on three rules for the floor team:

• Never guess. If you do not know, you ask the kitchen, every single time, even if it is the same dish you served yesterday.
• The matrix lives in one place, and everyone knows where. We had a laminated copy by the pass and a digital version on the tills.
• Any allergen request gets confirmed by the chef on the pass before the food leaves. Not the KP, not the commis. The chef on the pass.

Allergen training in the UK is not formally mandated to a specific qualification, but the law expects you to demonstrate that staff have been trained. The FSA's free allergen training course is a perfectly good starting point and takes about an hour. Document who has completed it, and when. An EHO will ask.

Natasha's Law and PPDS labelling

Since October 2021, any food that is pre-packed for direct sale (PPDS) has to carry a label with the full ingredients list and the 14 allergens emphasised (usually in bold). This came in after the death of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who ate a Pret baguette in 2016 that contained sesame she did not know was there.

PPDS means food packed by you, on the premises where it is sold, before the customer orders it. So:

• Sandwiches in your grab-and-go fridge: PPDS, needs a label.
• A sandwich made to order at the counter: not PPDS, but you still need allergen info available.
• A salad bowl prepped at 8am and stacked in the chiller for lunch trade: PPDS, needs a label.
• A cake sliced to order from a whole cake on display: not PPDS.

This trips up a lot of cafés because the grey area between "made fresh to order" and "prepped this morning and chilled" is exactly where most café food sits. Get it wrong and you are looking at a fine and, again, the criminal liability that comes with allergen failures.

The label needs the full ingredient list, with allergens emphasised, and the product name. Not just "ham sandwich, contains gluten and milk". The full list, like you would see on a Tesco meal deal.

Common mistakes

• Trusting the supplier spec sheet and never checking again: suppliers reformulate without warning. Our bread example is not unusual. Build a calendar reminder to re-request specs every six months minimum.
• Letting the matrix get out of date when specials change: specials are where most allergen failures happen, because they are not on the printed menu and the matrix often forgets them.
• Using "may contain" as a get-out clause: blanket disclaimers are not a defence. They are a sign you have not done the work.
• Training the kitchen but not the floor: the floor takes the orders. If they cannot read your matrix or do not know where it is, the kitchen's careful work is useless.
• Treating allergen sheets as compliance theatre: a binder no one opens does not protect anyone. The matrix has to be a living document the team actually uses.
• Forgetting PPDS labelling on prepped salads and sandwiches: this is the most common thing I see when I walk into other cafés now. The labels are missing or incomplete.