For your business
Natasha’s Law for home bakers
Baking from a registered home kitchen does not exempt you. If you pack a product before the customer chooses it — a box of brownies for a market, a bagged cookie for a collection — that pack needs a label. Bespoke cakes made to order are a different case.
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 home bakers business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Brownie boxes packed at home and sold at a market
- Cookie packs made up in advance for a fair
- Cupcake boxes put out ready on a stall
- Traybake slices bagged before the event
Doesn’t
- A birthday cake made to a customer’s order and collected
- A cake decorated to a brief and boxed at handover
- Anything you make after a specific order and hand over unpackaged
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: celebration and birthday cakes, cupcakes and cake boxes, brownie and traybake postal boxes, cookie and biscuit packs, market and fair stock, seasonal gift boxes.
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.
Supermarket own-brand ingredients
Own-brand recipes change more often than branded ones, and the change is rarely announced. Re-read the pack each time you buy a new batch rather than assuming it matches last month.
Ready-to-roll icing and fondant
A bought-in compound ingredient with its own list — glucose syrup, glycerine, emulsifiers, sometimes egg white in royal icing. It goes in brackets.
Flavourings and extracts
Small quantities, still ingredients. Some carry sulphites or nut derivatives, and “natural flavouring” on your bottle is not a complete answer.
Sprinkles and toppers
Bought-in decorations carry colours, glazing agents and sometimes soya. If it is on the cake, it is in the list.
Vegan substitutes
Plant drinks and spreads are not dairy, but many carry soya, and some “butter” alternatives carry nuts. Do not assume vegan means fewer allergens.
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.
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
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
How it fits into the day
The night before a market
Labels printed at home on sheet stock, in the same session as the packing. A sheet of 21 or 24 labels from an ordinary printer is enough for most stalls.
Repeat products
The same six things go to every market. Once they are saved, labelling is a print job rather than a writing job.
A new flavour
Usually your existing base plus one or two new ingredients — so the work is confirming the new ones, not rebuilding the whole list.
Label size and printing
A4 sheet labels through a home printer are the practical choice: cheap to start, no extra hardware, and you print in batches the night before anyway. 63.5 × 38.1 mm (21 per sheet) is a common stock size that fits most traybake lists.
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 Natasha’s Law apply if I bake at home?
What about a birthday cake someone ordered?
I sell from an Instagram page. Does that change anything?
Do I need a special printer?
Is handwriting labels acceptable?
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 mobile sellers and street food vendorsFood Standards Agency / GOV.UK
- Introduction to allergen labelling for PPDS foodFood 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.