For your business
Natasha’s Law for wedding caterers
A plated wedding breakfast is not PPDS. Favour boxes, boxed cake slices and late-night snacks packed before guests pick them up are. Those packs need a name and a full ingredients list — the wedding breakfast allergen matrix does not replace the sticker.
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 wedding caterers business that usually splits like this.
Needs a label
- Boxes of favours packed before the day
- Cake slices in boxes for guests to choose
- Snack packs sealed before they are put out
Doesn’t
- The plated meal
- A loose sweet table or a cake cut and handed to guests
Allergen information still has to be available for these — just not as a printed label on the pack.
Typical products: favour cookies and brownies in boxes, wedding cake slices boxed for guests to take, late-night bacon or sausage baps packed in advance, sweet tables where items are bagged rather than loose.
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 favour cookie
Icing can contain egg white. Chocolate can contain soya. A ‘plain’ recipe card often misses both.
Cake slices versus the main cake
Marzipan and almond frangipane make a slice a tree-nut product even when the sponge was only wheat and egg.
A late-night bap
The bun may contain milk, egg and sesame. The sausage may contain wheat and sulphites.
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
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
Label favours when you pack them
Do not arrive at the venue with unlabelled boxes and a plan to explain them.
Match the slice to the tier
Fruit cake with marzipan and a vanilla sponge are different labels.
Keep vendor food separate
A doughnut wall from another business needs that business’s labels, not yours, unless you packed it.
Label size and printing
Small favour boxes still need a readable ingredients list. A tag with only the couple’s names is not a food label.
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 the wedding breakfast need PPDS labels on the plate?
Who labels a cake from an outside baker?
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.