For your business
Allergen labelling for caterers
Catering has two labelling problems at once. Individual boxes and packs need labels like anyone else’s — and clients increasingly want an allergen matrix for the whole menu before they will sign anything.
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 caterers business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Lunch boxes packed at your unit and delivered
- Wrapped platters put out for guests to take from
- Individually boxed desserts
- Anything packed ahead and handed to a guest as a unit
Doesn’t
- Food served from a buffet line onto a plate
- Plated service
- A carvery or live station
- Food supplied to another business to sell on — that is prepacked
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: individual buffet and lunch boxes, sandwich platters, wrapped, canapé boxes, desserts packed per head, delivered office lunches, wedding and event catering.
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.
Scaling a recipe
A recipe scaled from 10 to 200 keeps the same ingredients but the order by weight can shift if you substitute a component. The list has to reflect what you actually made.
Substitutions on the day
Someone swaps the mayonnaise brand because the usual one ran out. The label is now wrong, and nobody has written it down. This is the single biggest risk in catering.
Bought-in components
Chutneys, dressings, pastry cases, dips. Each has its own ingredients list, and each supplier reformulates on their own schedule.
Marinades and glazes
Soy sauce brings soya and wheat. Worcestershire sauce brings fish. Honey glazes are fine; the mustard in the rub is not always noticed.
Agency and casual staff
The person packing today may not be the person who wrote the recipe. If the label is printed from a saved product rather than written from memory, that stops mattering.
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
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
Chocolate Chip Cookie
Ingredients: WHEAT flour, Butter (MILK), MILK chocolate chips (sugar, cocoa butter, whole MILK powder, cocoa mass, emulsifier: SOYA lecithin), Caster sugar, Soft brown sugar, Free range EGG, Bicarbonate of soda, Sea salt.
Full worked example
How it fits into the day
Quoting an event
Clients ask for the allergen matrix at the quote stage. If it is generated from your saved menu, that is a download rather than an afternoon.
Production
Labels printed with the batch, from the saved product — so the same dish is labelled the same way whoever is packing.
After the event
A record of what was produced and what was on the label, which is the thing you want if a question comes back a week later.
Label size and printing
99 × 50 mm suits lunch boxes and platters, where you often want storage and date information alongside the ingredients. Individual desserts 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
Does buffet food need labels?
Our client wants an allergen matrix before booking. Is that a legal requirement?
How do we handle last-minute substitutions?
We cater for schools. Does that change anything?
What if we supply another business rather than the guest?
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.