Kitchen Crisis Protocols Every Head Chef Needs
TL;DR: Natasha’s Law explained: if your business prepares and packages food on-site before sale, every allergen must be declared on the label. This is UK law since October 2021, not guidance. Non-compliance is a legal failure, not an oversight.
Natasha’s Law explained, in plain terms: if your business prepares and sells food in the same place, and that food is wrapped or packaged before the customer orders it, every single allergen must be declared on the label. That is the law. Not guidance. Not best practice. The law.
I remember standing in a bakery kitchen in 2021, watching a young sous chef carefully rewrite her ingredient list for the third time that morning. She was not being precious. She was trying to make sure that the sesame in the tahini glaze on the morning buns was listed correctly, because she understood, without anyone having to spell it out, that getting it wrong could kill someone. That is the level of seriousness we are talking about.
Natasha’s Law came into force in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in October 2021. It is named after Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who died in 2016 after eating a baguette from a Pret a Manger that contained sesame, which was not listed on any label. She was fifteen. The law is a direct response to that failure, and to the very specific gap it exposed: food that is made and packaged on the premises before sale.
Before 2021, this category of food sat in a legal grey area. Pre-packaged food from factories required full labelling. Food made fresh to order required verbal allergen information. But food prepared and wrapped on-site before the customer walked through the door? The rules were far less clear. Natasha’s Law closed that gap by introducing a specific category: PPDS food, which stands for pre-packaged for direct sale.
PPDS food is any food that is packaged on the same premises where it is sold, before the customer selects or orders it. A wrapped sandwich made that morning. A boxed slice of cake with a handwritten label. A grab-and-go salad pot. If it is packed before the transaction, it is PPDS, and it requires full allergen labelling on the packaging itself.
The label must show the name of the food and a full ingredients list, with each of the fourteen major allergens emphasised clearly within that list. Emphasis means making them visually distinct, typically through bold text or capitalisation. The allergens must appear in context, not in a separate box or footnote. This matters because the requirement is not just about disclosure. It is about clarity at the point of purchase.
The fourteen allergens covered by UK allergen law are:
Every one of these that appears as an ingredient, or as part of a compound ingredient, must be declared. If your lemon drizzle contains almond flour, you list the almond flour and emphasise tree nuts. There is no room for vagueness.
Allergen labelling for cafés is where I see the most confusion, and honestly, some of it is understandable. A small independent bakery is not a food factory with a compliance department. The owner is probably also the baker, the bookkeeper, and the person doing the school run. The law does not care about that, but it does at least apply equally to everyone, which means a well-run small bakery can absolutely meet the standard without turning the kitchen into a bureaucracy.
The practical starting point is knowing exactly what is in everything you make. That sounds obvious. It is not always as simple as it sounds. Many kitchens work with compound ingredients, things like ready-made pastry, bought-in sauces, or branded products where the ingredient list changes without warning when a supplier reformulates. Your label is only as accurate as your knowledge of your own ingredients, and that knowledge has to be current.
For delis and counter-service operations, the distinction between PPDS food and food sold loose is worth understanding properly. A wheel of cheese sitting on the counter and cut to order is not PPDS. The same cheese, pre-sliced and wrapped in cling film with a label before service, is. It is a physical and procedural distinction, not a philosophical one.
Ingredient labelling in hospitality sits within a wider allergen management obligation that all food businesses carry. Natasha’s Law specifically addresses PPDS food, but the Food Information Regulations 2014 require that businesses providing non-prepacked food, meaning food made to order and served immediately, can also provide accurate allergen information on request. The two sets of rules sit alongside each other. Neither cancels out the other.
In practice, this means a well-run kitchen needs three things working in parallel. It needs accurate ingredient records for every dish or product. It needs a clear procedure for communicating allergen information to customers, whether that is through labelling, a menu, or staff training. And it needs a system for catching and updating information when recipes or suppliers change.
That last point is the one that trips people up most often. A recipe is a living document in a working kitchen. The sesame oil you used last month might have been replaced by a different brand that also contains peanut oil as a carrier. If your label still says the old formulation, you have a problem that has nothing to do with carelessness and everything to do with process.
Natasha’s Law for restaurants applies slightly differently than it does for a grab-and-go counter, because most restaurant food is not PPDS. A dish prepared and plated in response to an order is non-prepacked food and falls under the 2014 regulations rather than the 2021 amendment. But the moment a restaurant produces something in advance and wraps it for collection or delivery before the order is placed, the PPDS rules apply.
This catches out a lot of operations that added meal kits, collect-before-you-order options, or pre-packaged sides during the years when hospitality was scrambling to find new revenue streams. If your restaurant sells a pre-boxed afternoon tea or a wrapped take-home dessert that is prepared before the customer orders, those items need PPDS labels. The format of the business does not grant an exemption.
UK allergen law for food businesses is not designed to be punitive. It is designed to make the food supply legible to the people who need that information most. For someone managing a severe allergy, a correctly labelled product is not a nicety. It is the difference between eating safely and ending up in hospital.
Building a workable system does not require expensive software. It requires discipline and documentation. A spreadsheet listing every product, every ingredient, every allergen, and the supplier for each ingredient is a perfectly functional starting point. What matters is that it is maintained, that someone owns it, and that changes to recipes or suppliers trigger an automatic review of the relevant labels.
Staff training is the other half of this. Labels are static. Staff are not. A customer with a nut allergy who asks whether the almond croissant contains nuts deserves a confident, accurate answer, not a shrug and a ‘I think it might’. The Food Standards Agency has published training resources, and allergen awareness now features in most reputable food hygiene qualification programmes.
Yes, if the food is packaged before the customer selects or orders it and is sold on the same premises where it was made, it is PPDS and must carry a full allergen label. Selling at a market rather than a fixed premises does not remove that obligation.
The allergen must be visually distinct from the rest of the ingredients list. Bold text is the most common method. Capitalisation also works. Underlining is acceptable. The key requirement is that a customer can scan the list and immediately identify which ingredients are allergens without having to read every word carefully.
‘May contain’ warnings for cross-contamination are not required under Natasha’s Law, but they can be included voluntarily. If you do include them, they must be accurate. Using a blanket ‘may contain all allergens’ warning to avoid detailed work is not a compliant approach and may mislead customers into ignoring legitimate risks.
Local authority environmental health officers can issue improvement notices, and non-compliance can result in prosecution. Beyond the legal consequences, the reputational damage to a small food business following an allergen incident is significant. The food industry is built on trust, and trust is very difficult to rebuild once it is broken.
Some people treat allergen labelling as a compliance burden, an administrative cost imposed on small businesses by regulators who have never filleted a fish or laminated a croissant. I understand that frustration, and I have heard it plenty. But I do not share it.
A customer with a severe allergy who picks up one of your products and can read exactly what is in it, clearly and without ambiguity, does not just feel safe. They feel respected. And that feeling, that quiet confidence that the person who made this food took care with it, is precisely what builds the kind of loyalty that keeps a small food business alive through difficult years.
If your labelling is accurate, your ingredient records are solid, and your staff know what they are talking about, you are not just compliant. You are doing the thing that careful, serious food businesses have always done. You are telling the truth about what you make. That is not a burden. That is the job.
If you want to go further and build a proper system around all of this, we have put together a detailed guide on getting dietary compliance right across your whole operation. You can read Safe Plates: Mastering Dietary Compliance for the full framework, from ingredient records through to staff training.
Chef Ian McAndrew’s specialist eBooks and guides are available directly on ChefYesChef, including his technical titles and autobiography. If you want more practical, chef-led reading beyond this article, you’ll find the full collection here.
Chef Ian McAndrew works with chefs, businesses, and individuals on a wide range of culinary projects, from concept development to practical problem-solving.
If you’d like to talk through an idea or need informed guidance, you’re welcome to contact him.
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