PPDS
PPDS vs prepacked food
PPDS food needs three things on the label. Prepacked food needs six. The words are almost the same and the requirements are not, which is why so many small producers over-label one and under-label the other.
Reviewed against official guidance.SourcesNot legal advice.
The difference in one line
PPDS is food you packed and sell yourself, to the person who eats it, where the packing happened before they chose it. Prepacked is everything else that arrives already packaged — including the food you supply to another business to sell on.
Side by side
| On the label | PPDS | Prepacked |
|---|---|---|
| Name of the food | Required | Required |
| Full ingredients list | Required | Required |
| Allergens emphasised in the list | Required | Required |
| Net quantity | Not required | Required |
| “Best before” or “use by” | Not required | Required |
| Food business operator name and address | Not required | Required |
| ABV, over 1.2% | Not required | Required |
| QUID, where applicable | Where applicable | Where applicable |
A floor, not a ceiling
Other rules can apply to a particular product regardless of which category it sits in — organic claims, nutrition claims, specific compositional standards. Treat the table as the general case and check anything unusual about your product.
The same product, both ways
A chocolate brownie boxed on your own counter is PPDS. Three lines on the label:
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.
The identical brownie, boxed and supplied to a farm shop to sell, is prepacked. The ingredients list does not change — but the label now also needs a net weight, a date mark and your name and address.
This is why the ingredients list is worth building once and keeping. Everything else is packaging around the same core.
When you start supplying others
The move from “we sell what we make” to “we also supply a shop” changes your labelling obligations, and it tends to happen gradually enough that nobody notices.
- Net quantity — the weight or volume, in the right units and position.
- A date mark — “use by” for products with a microbial safety risk, “best before” otherwise. Choosing between them is a food safety judgement about your product.
- Your business name and address — a real address, not just a trading name.
- Storage instructions where they are needed for the date mark to mean anything.
Selling online
Distance selling adds a wrinkle: mandatory information — including allergens — generally has to be available to the customer before they buy, not only on the pack when it arrives. In practice that means the information appearing on the listing page as well as the label.
Where people go wrong
- Putting prepacked information on a PPDS label and running out of room for the ingredients list. The date and the address are the first things to drop on a small label.
- Treating wholesale like retail. The moment another business sells your product on, the fuller requirements apply.
- Assuming “prepacked” means “made in a factory”. It is about who sells it to the consumer, not the scale of production.
- Using the same label for both routes because it is easier. It is easier right up until it is wrong.
If you are unsure which category a product sits in, work through the decision path.
Questions
Is it wrong to put more on a PPDS label than required?
We sell the same cake in our shop and to a local café. One label or two?
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
- Food labelling: giving food information to consumersGOV.UK
- Labelling guidance for prepacked for direct sale (PPDS) food productsFood Standards Agency / GOV.UK
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