For your business
PPDS labelling for delis and farm shops
A deli counter is the clearest illustration of why PPDS is about food rather than businesses. The same cheese, weighed and wrapped while the customer watches, needs no label. Wrapped this morning and put in the chiller, it does.
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 delis & farm shops business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Cheese cut and wrapped this morning for the chiller
- Salad pots filled before opening
- Pies wrapped and priced ready to pick up
- Charcuterie packs made up in advance
Doesn’t
- Cheese weighed and wrapped to order at the counter
- Olives served from the tub into a pot at the point of sale
- A pie taken from the hot cabinet and bagged on request
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: pies, quiches and savouries, salads and coleslaw in pots, cheese and charcuterie, pre-wrapped, sandwiches and rolls, traybakes and cakes, own-made preserves and dips.
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 products you repack
Repacking someone else’s product makes it yours to label. Their declaration is your source, and when they reformulate, your label is out of date.
Cheese and rennet
Milk is obvious. The less obvious part is that your supplier’s description is not always a full ingredients list — you need the declaration, not the shelf card.
Cured meats
Sulphites are common, and some products carry milk or soya from processing aids. Read the declaration rather than assuming meat is just meat.
Dressed salads
Coleslaw and potato salad mean mayonnaise, which means egg and mustard. Celery turns up in more salads than people expect.
Chutneys and pickles
Mustard seed and sulphites, routinely. If you make them, they are a recipe. If you buy them and put them in a pack, they are a compound ingredient.
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 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
Opening
Whatever gets wrapped for the chiller gets a label, printed from the saved product rather than written out.
New line
A new bought-in product means capturing its declaration once — photograph the pack — and it is available for every product that uses it.
Supplier changes
The reformulation you were not told about. Update the ingredient and you get the list of everything to relabel.
Label size and printing
60 × 40 mm handles most counter items. Where the same product is sold both pre-wrapped and to order, print for the pre-wrapped version and keep the allergen information available for the rest.
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
Cheese cut to order — does it need a label?
We repack olives from a large tub. Whose label is it?
Do we need labels on hot food from the cabinet?
Our supplier sends a spec sheet, not an ingredients list.
We sell to a local café as well. Same labels?
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.