For your business
Natasha’s Law for takeaways
A meal cooked for the order in front of you is not PPDS. Pots of sauce, desserts, naan you bag before service, and any item you pack and hold for customers to choose are. Distance orders still need allergen information before the customer pays.
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 takeaways business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Mint yoghurt and mango chutney pots you fill and lid before orders
- Brownies boxed in the afternoon for the evening counter
- Samosas bagged before anyone orders
Doesn’t
- A curry or kebab made for that ticket and handed over
- Chips scooped to order
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: sauce and dip pots filled in advance, desserts and cakes boxed before the shift, packaged naan, samosas or cookies on the counter, retail bottles or jars you fill on 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.
The dip pot
Mint yoghurt is milk. Satay is peanuts. They travel in the bag even when the main was cooked to order.
Soy sauce and fish sauce
A gluten-free tile fails if the sauce is ordinary soy sauce, which contains wheat, or if fish sauce went in.
Shared fryer as a label
Cross-contact is not an ingredient. Do not hide undeclared ingredients behind a may-contain line.
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
Mark the prepacked list
Walk the service. Anything already in a pot or bag before the first order is the PPDS list.
Put allergens on the app
The customer ordering from the sofa cannot read the pot. The menu has to carry the same information.
Reprint dips when the tub changes
A new yoghurt or a vegan swap is a new label the same day.
Label size and printing
Small sauce lids need a label on the pot wall if the lid is too small for the full list. The list still has to be complete and readable.
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 takeaway meal need a PPDS label?
Where do delivery customers read allergens?
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.