For your business
Natasha’s Law for market stalls
The FSA wrote guidance specifically for mobile sellers, and it settles the question most stallholders ask: food you packed at home and brought to the stall is covered. Food you put into a box when someone orders it is not.
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 market stalls business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Meals put in containers before they are ordered
- Cartons of chips or nuggets under a hot lamp ahead of the rush
- Prepacked paninis or boxes of pizza reheated on request
- Packaged sandwiches or salad boxes
- Burgers wrapped and ready to sell
- Anything you packed at home and brought with you
Doesn’t
- Hot drinks made to order
- Pizza on display, slices served on an open tray
- Unpackaged cakes and pastries in a glass display
- Fried chicken that isn’t boxed under a hot lamp
- Chips put into packaging at the time of order
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: cakes and traybakes boxed at home, jars, bakes and preserves, burgers and wraps prepared ahead, boxed meals under a hot lamp, snack packs and bagged goods.
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.
Packing at home, selling elsewhere
The most common misunderstanding. Packing at a different location from where you sell is explicitly covered by the FSA guidance for mobile sellers.
Batch-to-batch variation
Market traders often buy whatever the cash-and-carry had that week. A different brand of the same thing can carry different allergens.
Sauces and relishes
Bought-in sauces carry mustard, soya, celery and sometimes fish through Worcestershire sauce. They are compound ingredients.
Bread and buns
Seeded buns bring sesame. Bought-in bread brings its own full list, which goes in brackets.
The lamp decision
The same food is PPDS or not depending on whether it went into the box before or after the order. Decide how you operate and label accordingly rather than switching mid-service.
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
Salted Caramel Brownie
Ingredients: Caster sugar, Butter (MILK), Free range EGGS, Dark chocolate (cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter, emulsifier: SOYA lecithin), WHEAT flour, Salted caramel (sugar, cream (MILK), butter (MILK), sea salt), Cocoa powder.
Full worked example
How it fits into the day
The night before
Labels printed at home with the packing, on sheet stock. No power needed at the stall.
Same products every week
Once saved, market stock is a print job. The list rarely changes between weeks.
A new supplier
Photograph the new pack, confirm the allergens once, and every product using it updates.
Label size and printing
Sheet labels printed at home are the practical answer — no power at the stall, and you are packing there anyway. 63.5 × 38.1 mm (21 per A4 sheet) fits most stall products.
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 to market stalls?
I bake at home and sell at a market. Which rules?
We box burgers under a lamp when it gets busy. Is that PPDS?
What about food we serve on an open tray?
We have no printer at the stall. Is that a problem?
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
- 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.