For your business
Natasha’s Law for restaurants
Food plated in the kitchen for the table is not PPDS. Cheesecakes in the fridge already sliced and boxed, sauce pots, and bread you bag to sell at the door are. The menu still has to give allergen information for the dishes that are not packed.
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 restaurants business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Cheesecake slices in pots before the first sitting
- Chutney jars filled and sealed on site
- Cookie bags on the counter
Doesn’t
- A main course plated for the order
- A dessert plated in the pastry section for that ticket
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: desserts portioned and lidded before service, retail sauces, pickles and biscuits you pack, bread and pastry bags by the till, set menus in boxes for collection, packed before the customer chooses the box.
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.
The biscuit base
A gluten-free filling on a digestive base is not gluten-free. Wheat and barley are in the base.
Petit fours with the bill
If they were packed before the customer could choose them, they are PPDS. A tray of loose chocolates is not.
A retail jar and a kitchen pan
The jar label has to match the batch in the jar, not the special you cooked at lunch.
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
Victoria Sponge
Ingredients: WHEAT flour, Caster sugar, Free range EGGS, Butter (MILK), Raspberry jam (sugar, raspberries, gelling agent: pectin, acidity regulator: citric acid), Baking powder.
Full worked example
How it fits into the day
Walk the fridge before service
Anything already portioned into packaging is your PPDS list for the night.
Keep the menu honest
Dishes that are not PPDS still need allergen information. Do not send people to a pack label that does not exist.
Retail is a recipe
Jars and bags get the same ingredient library as the kitchen, with a label before they are offered.
Label size and printing
A small dessert pot can take a label on the side. Do not shrink the ingredients list below a readable x-height to fit a logo.
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 every restaurant dish need a PPDS label?
What about a tasting menu sent out in boxes?
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
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.