Practical guide
Allergen labels: how to put allergens on food
On a PPDS label, allergens are not a separate box at the bottom. They live inside the ingredients list, emphasised so they stand out from everything around them — every time they appear.
Reviewed against official guidance.SourcesNot legal advice.
Where allergens go
The requirement is specific about placement. Any of the 14 allergens present must be emphasised within the ingredients list. That is different from how a lot of handwritten labels are built, where allergens get summarised underneath.
A summary line is not forbidden, and readers often like it. It simply does not do the job on its own.
Not enough
Chocolate brownie
Contains: milk, egg, wheat, soya
No ingredients list. A customer cannot see what is actually in it.
What it should look like
Chocolate brownie
Ingredients: caster sugar, butter (MILK), dark chocolate (…emulsifier: SOYA lecithin), EGGS, WHEAT flour…
Full list, allergens emphasised in place.
Four permitted methods
The FSA guidance permits any of:
| Method | Holds up when… | Fails when… |
|---|---|---|
| Bold type | Printed at a decent size on a clean label | The typeface is light, or the print is faint |
| CAPITAL LETTERS | Almost always — including on thermal printers | The whole list is already in capitals |
| Contrasting colours | Full-colour printing, good contrast | Monochrome printing, photocopies, or a reader who cannot distinguish the colours |
| Underlining | Short ingredient names | Small type, where it closes up and becomes a smudge |
Bold capitals is the combination we default to. It is the only one that works on every printer a small food business is likely to own, and it does not rely on the reader’s colour vision.
Every occurrence, not just the first
The FSA’s wording
“The allergenic ingredients within the food must be emphasised every time they appear in the ingredients list.”
This is the rule most often broken, and it is broken innocently — a salted caramel brownie has milk in the butter, and milk again in the caramel’s cream and butter. All three get emphasised.
Salted Caramel Brownie
Ingredients: Caster sugar, Butter (MILK), Free range EGGS, Dark chocolate (cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter, emulsifier: SOYA lecithin), WHEAT flour, Salted caramel (sugar, cream (MILK), butter (MILK), sea salt), Cocoa powder.
Inside compound ingredients
When an ingredient has its own ingredients — chocolate, pesto, mayonnaise, bought-in bread — those belong in brackets after its name, and allergens inside the brackets are emphasised too.
Full detail, including the 2% exemption: how to label compound ingredients.
The name-of-food exception
The guidance notes that emphasis “is not required in cases where the name of the food clearly refers to the allergen concerned, such as ‘milk’”. If the product is a bottle of milk, nobody needs the word bolded.
For a made product with a full ingredients list, the exception rarely helps and always costs a judgement call. Emphasising anyway is free.
“May contain”
Precautionary allergen labelling is not a legal requirement. The FSA recommends that information about the unintended presence of allergens is communicated where it applies.
The test is whether the risk is real and cannot be designed out:
- Reasonable: you make nut brownies and plain brownies on the same bench, and cannot fully separate them.
- Not reasonable: printing “may contain nuts” on everything because it feels safer. Used that way it stops carrying information, and the customers who rely on it learn to ignore it.
If you do use it, keep it separate from the ingredients list — it is not an ingredient.
Food sold loose
If the food is not PPDS — made to order, served unpackaged, bagged at the till — allergen information still has to be available, but it does not have to be printed on the pack. A folder at the counter, a board, or staff who know the answer are all acceptable.
The weakness of that route is that it depends on who is working. It is worth considering whether labelling everything is simpler than running two systems side by side — one method, consistently applied, is easier to train and easier to check.
Questions
Can I just write “Contains: milk, wheat, egg” at the bottom?
Is bold enough, or does it need to be capitals as well?
Do I need to emphasise an allergen in a compound ingredient’s brackets?
Should I use “may contain” to be safe?
What about food I sell loose?
Official sources
Everything on this page traces back to these. Where they and we disagree, they are right — tell us and we'll fix it.
- Labelling guidance for prepacked for direct sale (PPDS) food productsFood Standards Agency / GOV.UK
- Food allergen labelling and information requirements technical guidanceFood Standards Agency / GOV.UK
- Food labelling: giving food information to consumersGOV.UK
Stop bolding allergens by hand
Paste your ingredients once. Every allergen gets emphasised, everywhere it appears, on every label that uses that ingredient.