For your business
Natasha’s Law for pubs
A pub kitchen often mixes made-to-order plates with food packed before service. Anything sealed on your premises before the customer chooses it needs a Natasha’s Law label: name, full ingredients, allergens emphasised.
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 pubs business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Sandwiches made in the morning and boxed before service
- Cakes portioned and wrapped before customers arrive
- Snack pots filled and lidded ahead of the rush
Doesn’t
- Meals cooked and plated to order
- Loose crisps or nuts from open containers (allergen info still required by other means)
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: pre-packed sandwiches and wraps in the fridge, sealed cakes and traybakes for the bar, grab-and-go salad pots, bar snacks packed before opening.
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.
Worcestershire and Caesar
Anchovy (fish) hides in sauces used on bar food and salads.
Bread and buns from suppliers
Sesame, milk powder and soya lecithin appear in “plain” buns — keep supplier specs.
Shared prep
A sealed sandwich still needs an accurate list even if the kitchen also cooks to order.
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
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
Separate PPDS from menu items
If it is boxed before anyone orders it, it is on the label list. If it is cooked to ticket, it is not.
Reuse fillings as ingredients
Chicken mayo, coleslaw and cake sponges become library items used across the week’s PPDS range.
Reprint after a supplier swap
A new bun or dressing is a new label for every product that uses it.
Label size and printing
Fridge-facing labels need to stay readable when condensation forms. Bold emphasis survives better than colour.
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
Do Sunday roast leftovers packed for takeaway need labels?
What about nuts in bowls on the bar?
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.