For your business
Natasha’s Law for sushi bars
A sushi box assembled and lidded before the customer chooses it is PPDS. Rice and nori are not the allergens. Fish, sesame, prawn and soy sauce — soya, and wheat unless it is a wheat-free tamari — are.
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 sushi bars business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Boxes in the fridge the customer picks up
- Soy and wasabi pots you fill yourself
- Salads lidded before the lunch rush
Doesn’t
- Nigiri made to order at the counter
- A roll prepared in front of the customer
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: pre-packed sushi and poke boxes, sauce pots filled in advance, seaweed salads lidded before display, dessert mochi or cake pots you pack.
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.
Soy sauce
Ordinary soy sauce is soya and wheat. A gluten-free box that includes it is not gluten-free.
Sesame on the rice
A sprinkle is still sesame. It belongs in the ingredients list.
Crab stick
Surimi can contain fish, wheat, egg and crustaceans. It is not ‘just crab’.
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
Label the box, not the fish
Each packed range — salmon, tuna, veggie — gets the list for what is actually in that box.
Keep tamari and soy apart
They are different allergens. The bottle in the pot decides the label.
Include the garnish
Sesame, mayo and tobiko are ingredients of the box the customer buys.
Label size and printing
A label on the lid must survive the fridge. Put the full list where it can be read without opening the box.
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 nori an allergen?
Do made-to-order rolls need a PPDS sticker?
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.