For your business
Natasha’s Law for ghost kitchens
A delivery-only kitchen that packs food before the courier collects it is still packing PPDS food when that food was sealed before the customer chose the physical item. The ingredients list has to be on the pack and available at the point of order.
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 ghost kitchens business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Cakes and cookies boxed before they are offered
- Dip pots filled and lidded in advance
- Meal components sealed before the order is assembled, sold as those packs
Doesn’t
- A burger assembled to the ticket and handed straight to the courier, not offered as a prepacked item
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: sealed dessert pots and cake slices, sauce pots packed into the bag, branded meal boxes assembled before the ticket prints, retail packs you also sell on the same site.
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.
One recipe, three virtual brands
If the sauce differs by brand, the label differs. A shared kitchen cannot share one ingredients list across different recipes.
The app says ‘ask the restaurant’
Distance selling needs the allergen information before the order is placed, not a note to phone someone.
A swapped bun
Sesame buns and brioche are different allergens. The ticket and the sticker have to match the bun that went in the box.
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
Decide what is actually PPDS
Food cooked to the order is not the same as food you packed earlier and then sell. Label the second kind.
Put the same list on the app
The sticker in the bag and the menu online are one recipe. Update both when a supplier changes.
Separate allergen-aware builds
A gluten-free build that still uses ordinary soy sauce is not the claim on the tile.
Label size and printing
Thermal stickers on hot lids smear. Print the full list and test one label on the real packaging before the service.
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
Does a delivery burger need a PPDS label?
Can each virtual brand rely on the kitchen’s master sheet?
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.