Allergen Tracking for Home Bakers
Home bakers face the same allergen law as a factory and have none of the infrastructure. This covers what you must declare, what you genuinely cannot promise from a shared kitchen, and a record-keeping routine that survives a busy week.
The law does not scale down
There is no small-producer exemption. If you sell pre-packed for direct sale food, it needs a label with the full ingredient list and the 14 allergens emphasised, whether you produce four items a week or four thousand.
What does change at small scale is the infrastructure available to comply. A factory has segregated lines and a QA function. A home baker has one oven, one set of bowls and their own memory — which is exactly why the record-keeping matters more, not less.
The four that catch home bakers
Soya lecithin is the one most often missed, because it sits inside chocolate rather than being an ingredient you add. The full guide to the 14 allergens covers all of them.
What you cannot promise
A domestic kitchen cannot deliver the segregation a “free from” claim implies. You can be careful — dedicated equipment, cleaning down, sequencing allergen-free work first — but you cannot validate the absence of a trace the way a segregated facility can.
Say so plainly. “Made in a kitchen that also handles nuts, wheat and milk” is honest, useful and protects both parties. What it must never do is replace the ingredient list — precautionary labelling is voluntary and additional, never a substitute.
Blanket “may contain everything” statements are worse than useless: they are ignored by the people who most need the information.
A routine that survives a busy week
- Photograph the pack of every new ingredient when it arrives. Thirty seconds, and it is your spec record.
- Check the pack against your record on every delivery. Reformulations are announced on packs, not to customers.
- Record all 14 per ingredient, including the noes. A blank is indistinguishable from an omission.
- Never type an allergen list onto a label. Derive it from the recipe, or you will eventually derive it from memory.
- Destroy old labels when a recipe changes.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to list allergens if I only sell to friends? If money changes hands and the food is pre-packed, yes. There is no friends-and-family exemption.
Can I say gluten free? Only if the product is below 20 parts per million, which is difficult to assure in a shared kitchen. “No gluten-containing ingredients” is a different and safer claim. See gluten-free from a cake shed.