For your business
Natasha’s Law for hotels
Hotel breakfast and grab-and-go ranges often pack food before guests choose it. Those packs need the name of the food and a full ingredients list with the 14 allergens emphasised — the same Natasha’s Law rule as a high-street café.
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 hotels business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Pastries bagged before the breakfast service opens
- Snack boxes assembled in the kitchen before delivery to rooms
- Salad pots lidded ahead of a conference break
Doesn’t
- Hot breakfast cooked to order on the pass
- Buffet items guests serve themselves from open trays (other allergen communication still applies)
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: pre-packed breakfast pastries and muffins, sealed yoghurt and granola pots, room fridge snack packs assembled on site, conference lunch boxes packed ahead.
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.
Pastry from multiple suppliers
Croissants and danishes vary — milk, egg and sesame shift between brands.
Breakfast preserves and spreads
Individual portions packed by you may need labelling if assembled into a guest pack before choice.
Outsourced kitchens
If another site packs for you, check whether the product is PPDS or prepacked — the label duties differ.
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 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
Map the grab-and-go list
List every item sealed before a guest chooses it. That list is your PPDS catalogue.
One library across outlets
Share ingredient records between breakfast, conference and room service so a supplier change updates everywhere.
Train night and morning teams
Whoever packs at 5am needs the same accurate label as the day team.
Label size and printing
Small pastry bags suit 40×30 or 50×30 mm labels. Keep emphasis in bold or capitals for thermal printers.
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
Is a buffet croissant PPDS?
Do we need nutrition panels on breakfast packs?
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
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.