Allergens on your menu: showing them clearly

By Cravd Studio · 19 August 2026 · 8 min read

For most guests, allergen information is a convenience. For some, it is the difference between a good evening and a hospital. Around 6% of UK adults — roughly 2.4 million people — have a clinically-confirmed food allergy, according to the Food Standards Agency, and that is before you count children and the far larger group with intolerances. A menu that shows allergen information clearly protects those guests, speeds up your staff, and quietly signals a careful kitchen. Here is how to do it well.

What UK restaurants must provide

Meals served on a plate in a restaurant are classed as non-prepacked food. UK food businesses must provide accurate information when a dish contains any of the 14 regulated allergens. They can provide it in writing, or verbally with clear signposting telling guests how to obtain it; current Food Standards Agency best practice is written information supported by a conversation with staff. A full ingredients list is not required for a plated restaurant meal. Natasha's Law is a separate rule for food prepacked for direct sale, such as a sandwich packaged on the premises before the customer chooses it. That food requires a label with a full ingredients list and allergenic ingredients emphasised. Restaurants may handle both categories, but they should not be confused.

The 14 allergens, in plain terms

In the UK and EU, fourteen allergens must be declared: celery; cereals containing gluten; crustaceans; eggs; fish; lupin; milk; molluscs; mustard; tree nuts; peanuts; sesame; soybeans; and sulphur dioxide and sulphites. A guest with an allergy needs to find, at a glance, which dishes involve theirs — without a conversation, and without doubt. On a printed menu this usually becomes a thicket of superscript numbers and a footnote key; on a good digital menu it can be a filter.

Why free-typed allergen text is risky

The tempting shortcut is to let staff type allergen notes into a free-text box per dish. It is also the most dangerous option, for three reasons. First, free text drifts: "may contain nuts", "contains nuts", "nut-free (cooked in same oil)" and a blank field all mean different things, and no system can reason about the difference. Second, free text does not translate safely — run it through machine translation for an international guest and "nut-free" can quietly become "nuts", which is exactly the mistake you cannot afford on a safety-critical field. Third, it cannot be filtered reliably, so the guest is back to reading every line. The safer design is to store allergens as a fixed, numbered set — the same 14 codes for every dish — and render them from a single, human-checked legend. That is precisely how Cravd handles them: allergens are structured codes, never free text, and they are confirmed by a person before a dish goes live.

Let guests filter, don't make them hunt

The best digital menus go one step further than displaying allergens: they let a guest filter the menu to what they can actually eat. Someone avoiding nuts sees only the dishes that work for them, instead of scanning every line and second-guessing the footnotes. It removes anxiety, cuts the "can I just check with the kitchen?" interruptions during a busy service, and helps people order faster and with more confidence. Because the allergens are stored as structured data rather than prose, the filter is exact — it is reading codes, not guessing at sentences.

Dietary tags are not the same as allergens

Vegetarian, vegan, halal and similar tags are helpful, but they are preferences and lifestyle choices, not safety information. Keep them clearly separate from allergens so no one mistakes a "vegan" label for an "allergen-free" guarantee — a vegan dish can still contain gluten, nuts or sesame. Both belong on a good menu; they simply do different jobs, and blurring them is how a guest ends up trusting a tag that was never meant to carry that weight.

Always keep the human check

Even a perfect on-screen list should invite a guest with a serious allergy to confirm it with a member of staff. Recipes and suppliers change, and shared fryers, grills and surfaces carry a risk a menu can never fully capture. The goal of clear allergen information on the menu is not to replace that conversation but to make it shorter and better-informed: the guest arrives already knowing which dishes are worth asking about, and your team spends its attention where it matters. Clear information on the screen plus a quick, confident word from the floor is the belt-and-braces approach that keeps everyone safe.

Allergen information is the one part of a menu where "roughly right" is not good enough. Structure it, translate it safely, and always leave room for a human to confirm.