How to create a Natasha's Law label

1. Confirm the product actually needs a label

A label is required for prepacked for direct sale food: in packaging, and packed before the customer chose it. If you make it to order, or sell it unpackaged, you need to provide allergen information but not a label on the pack.

Worth doing properly once for your whole range — work through the decision path — because it changes what you have to produce.

2. Gather the supplier declarations

This is the slow part and there is no way round it. For every bought-in ingredient you need the declaration as printed on the pack, not the product name and not a spec-sheet summary.

• Photograph the back of every pack as you go. It is faster than transcribing, and you have the evidence if a question comes up later.
• Ask suppliers for the declaration in writing for anything you buy in bulk without retail packaging.
• Date what you collect. A declaration is a snapshot; suppliers reformulate.

3. Write the list in descending order of weight

Ingredients go heaviest first, by weight at the time the product was made — so before baking, not after it loses water in the oven.

Work from your recipe quantities rather than intuition. Sugar and butter routinely outweigh flour in a traybake, which surprises people the first time they weigh it. More on ordering, including what to do with a recipe you make by eye.

4. Break out compound ingredients

Any ingredient that has its own ingredients — chocolate, jam, bought-in bread, mayonnaise, pesto — shows them in brackets after its name.

dark chocolate (cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter, emulsifier: soya lecithin)

There is an exemption for compound ingredients making up less than 2% of the finished product, with conditions — the detail is here.

5. Emphasise the allergens

Go through the finished list and emphasise every one of the 14 allergens, every time it appears — including inside the brackets you just wrote.

Two shapes to watch for:

• The allergen is in the name: “wheat flour” becomes “WHEAT flour”.
• The allergen is not in the name: “butter” becomes “Butter (MILK)”.

Which emphasis method to use — bold, capitals, colour or underline are all permitted.

6. Get it onto a label

Name at the top and clearly larger. Ingredients as running text rather than a column — it fits far better. Minimum x-height of 1.2 mm, or 0.9 mm where the largest surface of the packaging is under 80 cm²; the font size rules in full.

If it does not fit, go up a label size before you shrink the text. The legibility floor is not negotiable, and the business name and date are not PPDS requirements — so they can go.

Keeping it right afterwards

A label is correct on the day you make it. What breaks it is a recipe change or a supplier reformulation that nobody notices.

• Keep the supplier declarations you gathered, dated, somewhere you can find them.
• When you change a recipe, change the label the same day — not at the end of the week.
• When a supplier changes something, work out which products it touches before you reprint anything.

Questions