For your business
Natasha’s Law for bakeries
A bakery counter usually holds three kinds of product at once: things boxed up before anyone chooses them, things sliced to order, and things sitting open on a stand. Only the first kind needs a label — and it is almost always the one with the most compound ingredients in it.
Reviewed against official guidance.SourcesNot legal advice.
Which of your products need a label
PPDS applies to food that is in packaging before the customer chooses it. For a bakeries business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Brownies boxed up on the counter before opening
- A bagged loaf put out on the shelf ready to grab
- Cookie multipacks made up in advance
- Slices of cake pre-boxed for the lunch rush
- Bakery boxes assembled ahead for collection
Doesn’t
- A whole cake on a stand, sliced to order
- A loaf sliced and bagged after the customer asks
- Pastries under a dome, served with tongs
- A celebration cake made to a customer’s order
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: brownies and traybakes, cookies and biscuits, celebration and cut cakes, pastries and viennoiserie, loaves, bagged before sale, bakery boxes and gift sets.
What catches people out
Almost every wrong label in this trade comes from the same handful of ingredients — the ones with their own ingredients inside them.
Chocolate
Nearly always carries soya lecithin, and milk chocolate carries milk. The emulsifier is the thing that changes when a supplier reformulates — some have moved to sunflower lecithin, which changes every label using that chocolate.
Fillings and frostings
Buttercream is butter (milk) and often has cream too. Caramel brings milk again. Jam brings a gelling agent and an acidity regulator that both belong in the list.
Decorations
Sprinkles, pearls and pre-made toppers are bought-in products with their own ingredients — colours, glazing agents, sometimes soya. A decoration is an ingredient.
Bought-in bases and mixes
A pastry case or a concentrated mix is a compound ingredient. Its own ingredients go in brackets, and its allergens are emphasised inside them.
Dried fruit
Apricots, sultanas and glacé fruit commonly carry sulphites, declarable above 10 mg/kg. The fruit loaf and the Christmas cake are where this shows up.
Nut flours and marzipan
Name the nut, not “nuts” — almond in marzipan and frangipane, hazelnut in praline. And almond flour, despite the word flour, contains no wheat.
The general rule behind all of these: how to label compound ingredients.
Example labels
Produced by the same engine that runs our free generator, so they show what the product actually does rather than an idealised mock-up.
Chocolate Brownie
Ingredients: Caster sugar, Butter (MILK), Free range EGGS, Dark chocolate (cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter, emulsifier: SOYA lecithin), WHEAT flour, Cocoa powder, Sea salt.
Full worked example
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.
Full worked example
Victoria Sponge
Ingredients: WHEAT flour, Caster sugar, Free range EGGS, Butter (MILK), Raspberry jam (sugar, raspberries, gelling agent: pectin, acidity regulator: citric acid), Baking powder.
Full worked example
How it fits into the day
Bake day
Labels get printed with the batch, not afterwards. If the product is already in your library, that is one action: open it, print the number you need.
New product
Most new bakery products are old ingredients in a new arrangement. Pull the chocolate, the flour and the butter you have already confirmed, add the one new thing, set the quantities.
A supplier changes the chocolate
Update the ingredient once and see every traybake, cookie and cake that uses it — which is the list of labels you need to reprint.
Label size and printing
60 × 40 mm covers most traybakes and boxed items comfortably. Cookies and small items fit 50 × 30 mm. Buy one size that fits your most complicated product rather than three sizes you have to keep straight on a busy Saturday.
More on sizes and print formats: the PPDS label template.
What LabelClear doesn’t do
It organises what you tell it and keeps it consistent across your products. It cannot know about cross-contamination in your kitchen, a substitution made on a busy day, or an allergen a supplier added without saying. The checking is still yours.
Questions
Does a celebration cake made to order need a label?
What about a loaf we bag ourselves and put on the shelf?
Do we need a label on each brownie in a box of six?
We use the same sponge for eight products. Do we type it eight times?
Our chocolate supplier changed the emulsifier. What now?
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.
- PPDS allergen labelling changes for bakersFood Standards Agency / GOV.UK
- Introduction to allergen labelling for PPDS foodFood Standards Agency / GOV.UK
- Labelling guidance for prepacked for direct sale (PPDS) food productsFood Standards Agency / GOV.UK
Similar businesses
Try it on one of your products
Paste the ingredients for whichever product is the most annoying to label. That is where this earns its keep.