For your business
Natasha’s Law for butchers
If you pack sausages, burgers or marinated cuts on your premises before the customer picks them, those packs are PPDS. The label needs the name of the food and a full ingredients list with allergens emphasised — including fillers, rusk and sauces.
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 butchers business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Sausages filled, linked and trayed before the customer chooses
- Burgers formed and wrapped on the counter ahead of sale
- Marinated meat sealed in trays on your premises
Doesn’t
- Meat cut and wrapped to order at the counter
- Loose cuts chosen from the display and packed while the customer waits
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: pre-packed sausages and burgers, marinated chicken and kebabs in trays, stuffed joints packed before sale, ready-to-cook meal kits assembled on site.
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.
Rusk and fillers
Many sausage mixes use wheat rusk. Name the grain — WHEAT — not just “gluten” or “rusk”.
Marinades and glazes
Soy, sesame, mustard and celery turn up in ready marinades. Break compound sauces into their ingredients when they matter.
Cheese-filled products
A cheese centre brings milk onto a product that looks like “just meat”.
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.
How it fits into the day
Save every mix as an ingredient
Your house sausage mix, burger mix and each marinade become library items. New trays reuse them instead of retyping.
Label the tray when you pack it
If it is sealed before anyone chooses it, the label goes on then — not when it leaves the till.
Reprint when the supplier changes
A new rusk or marinade spec is a label update for every product that uses it.
Label size and printing
Tray lids and wrap-around labels both work. Prefer bold or capitals for allergens — thermal printers on wet counters rarely keep colour contrast.
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
Is meat I wrap while the customer waits PPDS?
Do I list every cut of beef as an ingredient?
We supply pubs with our burgers. Same label?
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 butchersFood 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.