For your business
Natasha’s Law for fishmongers
Fish on an open slab is loose food. Fishcakes, pâtés, dressed crab and sauce pots packed before the customer chooses them are PPDS, and the label has to show more than the word fish — wheat in the crumb, milk in the sauce, crustaceans in the prawn.
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 fishmongers business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Fishcakes breaded and boxed before the counter opens
- Pâté potted and lidded in the morning
- Prawn cocktail in a sealed pot
Doesn’t
- A fillet cut and wrapped to order
- Loose shellfish the customer points at on the ice
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: fishcakes and fish pies in trays, smoked-fish pâté pots, dressed crab and prawn cocktails, marinades and sauces you pack yourself.
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.
Breadcrumbs and rusk
A fishcake is fish and wheat. The crumb is not optional on the label.
Prawn versus fish
Prawns are crustaceans, not fish. A mixed seafood pot has to emphasise both.
Butter in the pâté
Smoked mackerel pâté made with butter or cream cheese is milk as well as fish.
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.
How it fits into the day
Split the slab from the fridge
Loose fish stays a service conversation. Anything in a pot or box before the customer chooses it gets a printed ingredients list.
One spec per mix
Salmon fishcakes and smoked haddock fishcakes do not share a label if the sauce or the crumb differs.
Sauce on the side
If tartare is in the same pack, egg and mustard from the mayonnaise go on the label.
Label size and printing
Cold, wet packs need a label that stays on. Keep the ingredients list at a readable x-height even on a small pot lid.
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
Is a fillet in paper PPDS?
Do I write the species?
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
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.