For your business
Natasha’s Law for ice cream parlours
A scoop in a cone, served to order, is not PPDS. A tub, an ice cream sandwich or a slice of cake packed before the customer chooses it is. Milk is the obvious allergen. Egg in the custard, soya in the chocolate and nuts in the mix are the ones that get missed.
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 ice cream parlours business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Tubs lidded before they go in the display freezer
- Cookie sandwiches assembled and wrapped in advance
- Sauce pots filled in the kitchen
Doesn’t
- Scoops served into a cone or tub at the moment of order
- Loose toppings in open containers the server adds
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: pre-packed tubs you fill on site, ice cream sandwiches and cookie sandwiches, cake slices boxed for the freezer counter, topping pots 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.
Chocolate chips
Soya lecithin is in most chocolate. A vanilla tub and a chocolate-chip tub are different labels.
Waffle cones sold packed
Cones are wheat, and some contain soya or egg. A packed ice cream sandwich includes the cone or cookie.
Non-dairy flavours
Oat, soya and almond bases are not milk, but they are oats, soya or almonds. Coconut is not a tree nut.
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.
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
Chocolate Chip Cookie
Ingredients: WHEAT flour, Butter (MILK), MILK chocolate chips (sugar, cocoa butter, whole MILK powder, cocoa mass, emulsifier: SOYA lecithin), Caster sugar, Soft brown sugar, Free range EGG, Bicarbonate of soda, Sea salt.
Full worked example
How it fits into the day
Separate scoop service from packed tubs
The cabinet of scoops needs allergen information available. The tubs you pack need a label on each lid.
One card per flavour
Inclusions — biscuit, nut, sauce — belong on that flavour’s list, not on a generic ‘ice cream’ label.
Cones and cookies too
If they are part of a packed product, their ingredients are part of the list.
Label size and printing
Freezer labels fall off if the adhesive is wrong. Test the sticker on a cold tub. The list still has to meet the x-height.
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 scoop in a cone need a PPDS label?
Is gelato different from ice cream for labelling?
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.