Phoenix Journal · Kitchens
In UK food law “allergen” is not a loose hygiene idea but a closed list of fourteen named substances - and keeping your declaration true depends as much on how clean the kitchen is as on what goes in the recipe.
Case postmortem
A busy site kitchen served a customer a chicken salad box that was, on the menu, entirely free of tree nuts - and yet the customer reacted within minutes, and the environmental health officer who followed up found the failure had nothing to do with the recipe at all.
Here is how it played out. The kitchen ran a genuinely careful allergen matrix. Every dish was mapped, the pre-packed boxes carried a full ingredient list under Natasha’s Law, and the front-of-house team could recite the fourteen. On paper the operation was compliant. But the walnut garnish for a separate dessert line was chopped on the same section, the extraction canopy above that section had not been degreased in months, and airborne particulate plus a shared prep surface carried protein from one dish to another. The word “allergen” on the label meant one thing. What the kitchen actually delivered meant another.
This is the gap that catches good operators out. In UK food law, “allergen” is not a vague hygiene idea - it is a closed, legally defined list of fourteen substances, and the law expects you to control not just what you put in a dish but what ends up in it by accident. Understanding that definition precisely is the difference between a defensible operation and a prosecution.
The kitchen treated “allergen” as a labelling problem. In law it is a contamination problem as much as a declaration one, and the two failures compound.
The legal definition sits in the Food Information Regulations 2014, which give domestic effect to the retained EU Regulation 1169/2011. That regulation names fourteen allergens exactly: celery, cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, sulphur dioxide and sulphites (where present above 10 mg/kg or 10 mg/litre), and tree nuts. That is the whole list. A substance someone happens to be intolerant to but which is not on the list - a strawberry, say - is not an “allergen” for the purposes of the law. The fourteen are what you must declare, control, and be able to evidence.
The box in our case was labelled correctly for its own recipe. What went wrong is that the law does not stop at the recipe. Tree nut protein reached the food through cross-contact - shared equipment, an unclean surface, and grease-laden extraction that had stopped doing its job. Under the Food Safety Act 1990 and the general food safety requirements, serving food that is unsafe because of undeclared allergen presence is an offence regardless of whether your paperwork was tidy. The label said “no tree nuts”; the kitchen made that statement untrue through its own physical environment.
The second error was reaching for a blanket disclaimer. When challenged, the manager pointed to a “may contain nuts” line buried in a folder. Precautionary allergen labelling (PAL) does not work that way. The Food Standards Agency’s best practice guidance, updated in March 2025, is blunt on this: a “may contain” statement is only legitimate where a written, documented cross-contact risk assessment shows a real and unavoidable risk. A blanket “may contain everything” applied to dodge accountability is treated as misleading, and enforcement officers increasingly challenge it. You cannot disclaim your way out of a kitchen you have not cleaned.
Getting the definition right changes how you run the kitchen, so it is worth being precise. Three things are true at once, and each carries a legal duty.
First, the list is closed and specific. You declare the fourteen, you emphasise them in ingredient lists - typically in bold, capitals or a contrasting colour - and you can name the source, so “tree nuts (walnuts)” rather than a vague catch-all. Sulphur dioxide and sulphites only count once they exceed 10 parts per million, which is why they trip up operators using certain dried fruits, wines and preservatives without realising the threshold has been crossed.
Second, the duty attaches to different food types differently. Prepacked for direct sale food - the sandwich, salad or cake you make on site and package before the customer orders - must carry a full ingredient list with the fourteen emphasised, thanks to Natasha’s Law, named after Natasha Ednan-Laperouse. Food sold loose or packed to order still requires accurate allergen information, and since March 2025 the FSA’s best practice guidance strongly pushes for that information to be written down and available, backed by a conversation rather than relying on memory alone. The Government is due to begin evaluating the uptake of that guidance in spring 2026 to decide whether written information for non-prepacked food should become law in its own right - the change widely referred to as Owen’s Law.
Third, and this is the part kitchens miss, an accurate declaration is only true if the kitchen keeps it true. If your process introduces one of the fourteen through cross-contact, the food is legally unsafe and your declaration is a false statement. That is why allergen control and physical cleanliness are the same subject. A degreased extraction system, segregated equipment and a genuinely clean prep surface are not hygiene niceties bolted on to the side - they are how you make your allergen statements legally defensible.
The postmortem produced a short, practical programme. None of it is exotic - it is the discipline that turns a compliant-looking kitchen into a genuinely defensible one.
The outcome for our kitchen was straightforward. Once the extraction system was professionally degreased, the nut section was segregated, and cleaning was logged against the allergen matrix, the same menu became safe to serve - because the physical kitchen finally matched what the label claimed. The law had not changed. The kitchen’s honesty about its own environment had.
Questions
Fourteen. The list is fixed in law by the Food Information Regulations 2014, which carry across the requirements of retained EU Regulation 1169/2011, so it is not a matter of judgement. They are celery, cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, sulphur dioxide and sulphites above 10 parts per million, and tree nuts. Anything outside that list is not an "allergen" for labelling purposes, even if a customer is intolerant to it.
Only if it is honest and evidenced. The FSA's March 2025 best practice guidance is clear that precautionary allergen labelling should be used only where a written cross-contact risk assessment shows a genuine, unavoidable risk. A blanket "may contain everything" statement applied to avoid accountability is treated as misleading and is increasingly challenged by enforcement officers. It will not stand in for controlling the risk through segregation and cleaning.
Serving food that is unsafe because of an undeclared allergen is an offence under the Food Safety Act 1990 and the Food Information Regulations. Courts can impose unlimited fines, and serious cases can carry up to two years' imprisonment. Your defence usually rests on due diligence - being able to show, with dated records and cleaning logs, that you took all reasonable precautions to keep your allergen declarations true.
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