For your business
Natasha’s Law for farm shops
If your farm shop packs food on site before customers choose it — traybakes, pies, sandwiches, sealed salads — those packs need a full ingredients list with allergens emphasised. Loose produce and made-to-order counters follow different rules.
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 farm shops business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Cakes portioned and wrapped in the shop before display
- Pies packed into boxes on your premises ahead of sale
- Ready-made sandwiches sealed before the lunch rush
Doesn’t
- Loose fruit and vegetables
- Cheese cut and wrapped to order at the counter
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: farm bakery traybakes and loaves bagged on site, pies and quiches packed before sale, deli pots filled in the shop kitchen, gift boxes assembled before the customer picks one.
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.
Mixed gift hampers
If you assemble and seal a hamper before purchase, treat the packed food items by the rules that apply to each — PPDS items still need correct labels.
Home-made vs bought-in
Bought-in prepacked goods keep their manufacturer labels; food you pack on site is yours to label.
Seasonal recipes
Christmas cake and summer tarts change — update the library when the recipe changes, not at the till.
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.
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
Split packed vs loose
Walk the shop: sealed packs made here go on the PPDS list; loose and to-order do not.
Keep farm kitchen recipes as ingredients
Jams, chutneys and bakery mixes you make become reusable library rows.
Reprint after a harvest recipe change
A new chutney batch with mustard seed is a label change for every pack that uses it.
Label size and printing
Rustic packaging still needs a clear ingredients list. Print a plain label if the bag design cannot carry emphasis.
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
We bake in a farm kitchen and sell in the shop next door — is that PPDS?
Do jars of jam we fill on site need Natasha’s Law 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.
- 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
- PPDS allergen labelling changes for bakersFood 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.