For your business
Natasha’s Law for cafés
The sandwiches you make at eight for the lunch rush need labels. The one you build while a customer waits does not. Most cafés run both, which means the labelling job is really a sorting job first — and then a sandwich problem.
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 cafés business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Sandwiches wrapped at 8am for the chiller
- Salad boxes with lids on, on display
- Cake slices boxed and put on the counter
- Soup filled into pots before service
- Anything in the grab-and-go fridge
Doesn’t
- A toastie made to order
- Cake served on a plate
- A salad built at the counter while the customer chooses
- Coffee, and anything else made to order
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: sandwiches, wraps and baguettes, salad boxes and pots, pastries and cakes, boxed for grab-and-go, soup pots filled ahead, breakfast boxes and yoghurt pots.
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.
Bought-in bread
A sandwich’s bread is a compound ingredient with its own list — flour, water, yeast, salt, often an emulsifier and sometimes soya flour. Seeded loaves add sesame. That list belongs in brackets after “bread”.
Mayonnaise and dressings
Egg and mustard, almost always. Mustard is the one people forget, and it is in more dressings than you would expect.
Pesto
Usually cashew or pine nut, plus hard cheese. Name the specific nut — pine nuts are not on the UK tree-nut list, cashews are.
Deli meats and marinades
Cured meats commonly carry sulphites, and marinades bring soya, wheat and celery through soy sauce and stock.
Stock in soup
Stock cubes are the classic hiding place for celery. If a soup starts with stock, that wrapper is part of your ingredients list.
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.
Chicken & Pesto Sandwich
Ingredients: Bread (WHEAT flour, water, yeast, salt), Cooked chicken breast, Pesto (basil, sunflower oil, CASHEW nuts, hard cheese (MILK), garlic, salt), Mayonnaise (rapeseed oil, EGG yolk, vinegar, MUSTARD), Rocket.
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
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
How it fits into the day
Morning prep
Labels printed with the sandwiches, before service starts. If the fillings are saved, it is a print job of five minutes.
Changing the special
A weekly special built from ingredients already in the library, so the new label takes the time it takes to set quantities.
Mid-service reprint
Somebody spills a tray. You need twelve more labels now, not after a spreadsheet hunt — which is why this has to work on a phone.
Label size and printing
70 × 50 mm is the realistic size for sandwiches: three compound ingredients — bread, a sauce and a filling — produce a long list. Salad pots and cake boxes fit 60 × 40 mm.
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
Do made-to-order sandwiches need labels?
We pack sandwiches at one site and sell at two. Is that still PPDS?
Our bread supplier won’t give us a full ingredients list.
How do we handle a daily-changing salad?
Does a soup pot need a date on it?
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.
- 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.