Allergen Tracking for a UK Food Business
Allergen tracking is not a list, it is a chain — from supplier specification through every sub-recipe to the printed label. Systems fail at the joins, almost never because someone did not know flour contains gluten. Here is how to build a chain that holds, and how to test whether yours does.
Short answer: allergen tracking is not a list, it is a chain. An allergen enters at the ingredient, travels through every sub-recipe and recipe that uses it, and comes out on a label. Systems fail at the joins — almost never because someone did not know that flour contains gluten, and almost always because a change at one end did not reach the other. This guide sets out how to build the chain so it holds.
The chain, and where it breaks
Read that column of breaks again: not one is a knowledge failure. They are all propagation failures. That is why “we know our recipes” is not a control, and why allergen incidents happen in businesses run by careful people.
The 14, and the four that get missed
UK law requires you to declare celery, cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, sulphur dioxide and sulphites, and tree nuts. Full detail on each, including hidden sources, is in our guide to the 14 major allergens under UK law.
Four account for a disproportionate share of missed declarations in small food businesses, because they arrive inside something else:
- Celery — stock cubes, gravy granules, seasoning blends, some tomato products.
- Mustard — mayonnaise, salad dressings, curry powders, some sausages and cured meats.
- Sulphites — dried fruit, glacé cherries, some fruit juices and wine used in cooking. Very relevant to bakers.
- Lupin — occasionally in imported flour blends and some gluten-free products.
Glacé cherries are the one that catches bakers specifically: they are frequently sulphited, they go into fruit cakes without much thought, and sulphites above 10 mg/kg must be declared.
Building the ingredient layer properly
This is the work. Everything downstream is derived from it, so an hour spent here is worth a day spent anywhere else in the chain.
- List every raw ingredient you buy, at the level you buy it — the specific product, not the generic. “Flour” is not an ingredient; “Brand X strong white bread flour, 16 kg” is.
- Get the specification for each. Trade suppliers publish these; for retail products the pack label is the spec.
- Assess all 14 explicitly, recording no as well as yes. A blank is ambiguous; a recorded “no” is a decision you can defend.
- Break out compound ingredients so their sub-ingredients are visible and searchable.
- Note precautionary statements separately from the ingredient list. “May contain” is voluntary information and must never sit inside the mandatory list.
- Date the record so you know how old your information is.
Making change control real
The hardest part of allergen tracking is not the initial build, it is the fifth month, when a supplier quietly reformulates and nothing tells you. Three practical controls, in order of effort:
The first is free and worth doing regardless of what software you run. The third is what removes the memory dependency: when you update an ingredient, the system already knows which recipes, products and labels are downstream of it.
Cross-contamination is a separate problem
Allergen tracking tells you what is deliberately in the product. Cross-contamination is about what might get in by accident, and it is managed physically rather than in software: separate utensils or thorough cleaning between products, sequencing production so allergen-free work happens first, and storing open allergen-containing ingredients where they cannot spill into anything.
Be honest in what you claim. A shared domestic kitchen cannot promise “free from” in the way a segregated facility can, and saying so plainly protects both the customer and you. Precautionary labelling should reflect a real assessed risk, not be applied to everything as insurance — blanket “may contain” statements reduce the information available to the people who need it most.
What software does, specifically
FoodCore’s allergen management records the 14 allergens once at ingredient level and derives everything above it. Add an allergen to an ingredient and every recipe using it — including recipes nested inside other recipes — reflects it without further action, along with every label generated from those recipes and the allergen matrix for your range.
That is the specific claim worth testing on any tool you evaluate, ours included: add an allergen to one ingredient, then look at a product three levels up and see whether it changed on its own. Allergen tracking is on every plan from £25/month inc. VAT; the full allergen matrix export sits on the Core plan.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to record allergens that are not present? Not legally, but recording an explicit “no” rather than leaving a blank is what lets you show the assessment was made. Blanks are indistinguishable from omissions.
How often should I review supplier specifications? Quarterly is a reasonable baseline for a small producer, with a check against the pack on every delivery. Anything longer and you are relying on suppliers to tell you about changes, which they often do not.
Does an allergen matrix replace labels? No. A matrix is a summary across your range, useful for staff and inspections. PPDS food still needs its own compliant label with the full ingredient list and allergens emphasised.