Do I need allergen labels if I only sell at a market?

If the food is packed in advance and enclosed by its packaging, yes. If you cut and wrap to order in front of the customer, it is not PPDS and no printed ingredient label is required, but you must still be able to give accurate allergen information on request.

What must a Natasha's Law label show?

The name of the food, a full ingredient list in descending order of weight, the 14 regulated allergens emphasised within that list, sub-ingredients of any compound ingredient, an appropriate use-by or best-before date, storage conditions where relevant, and the name and address of the food business.

What are the penalties for getting allergen labelling wrong?

Enforcement is by your local authority and is usually improvement-focused in the first instance. Allergen offences can carry unlimited fines, and criminal liability can follow a serious incident. Most failures in practice are avoidable process slips rather than deliberate breaches.

Natasha's Law Checklist (2026): Every Item, Explained

Q: Can I write 'may contain nuts' instead of listing ingredients?

No. Precautionary allergen labelling is voluntary and additional. It never replaces the mandatory ingredient list with allergens emphasised. Using it as a substitute is one of the more common compliance failures.

If you pack food on the same premises you sell it from, and the customer can pick it up before ordering, it needs a Natasha’s Law label. This is the complete checklist — ingredient data, the label itself, dates, traceability and the process that keeps them in step — in the order an environmental health officer tends to ask about them.

Short answer: if you pack food on the same premises you sell it from, and the customer can pick it up before ordering, it is pre-packed for direct sale (PPDS) and it needs a label carrying the product name and a full ingredient list with the 14 regulated allergens emphasised. This checklist walks every item an environmental health officer can reasonably ask about, in the order they tend to ask.

Before the checklist: does Natasha’s Law even apply to you?

Plenty of small producers run this checklist and discover half of it is irrelevant to them, which is a good outcome. The law applies to PPDS food only. Three questions settle it.

Is the food packed before the customer orders it? A cake boxed and put on a shelf is packed in advance. A cake boxed after someone asks for it is not.
Is it packed on the same site it is sold from? Your kitchen and your stall count as the same operation if you packed it yourself and sell it directly.
Is it fully or partly enclosed by the packaging? A lidded box, a sealed bag, cling film over a tray — all enclosed.

Three yeses means PPDS and this checklist applies in full. If the food is made to order, served loose, or sold unpackaged, different allergen rules apply — you must still be able to give accurate allergen information, but you do not need a printed ingredient label. Our guide to what counts as PPDS food works through the edge cases.

The Natasha’s Law checklist

Work through this once for each product you sell. The first product takes twenty minutes; the rest take two, because most of the work is building the ingredient data underneath.

Section 1 — Ingredient data

Check	What good looks like
Every ingredient has a written specification	You hold the supplier’s spec sheet or pack label for each raw ingredient, not a memory of it
Compound ingredients broken down	“Chocolate chips” is not an ingredient. Its own sub-ingredients (cocoa mass, sugar, soya lecithin) must appear
Allergens recorded per ingredient	All 14 checked against each ingredient, including the ones people forget: celery, mustard, lupin, sulphites
“May contain” sources noted separately	Precautionary allergen labelling is voluntary and must never substitute for the mandatory ingredient list
Supplier change process exists	You know what happens when a supplier reformulates — who checks, and what gets reprinted

This section is where compliance actually lives. Everything below is downstream of it, and it is the reason spreadsheets struggle: change one ingredient spec and every affected recipe, label and matrix should change with it. Our guide to the 14 major allergens under UK law covers the hidden sources in detail.

Section 2 — The label itself

Required element	Rule	Common failure
Name of the food	Must describe the food accurately, not a brand or fancy name alone	“Nana’s Special” with no indication it is a lemon drizzle cake
Full ingredient list	Every ingredient, in descending order of weight at the time of use	Listing in recipe order rather than by weight
Allergens emphasised	Bold, capitals, contrasting colour or underline — consistently applied	Bolding some and not others, or a separate “contains” line instead of emphasis in the list
Compound ingredients expanded	Sub-ingredients in brackets after the compound name	“Margarine” with no breakdown
Legibility	Minimum 1.2 mm x-height for most packs, clear and indelible	Shrinking the font to fit a small label

Section 3 — Date and storage

Use-by or best-before, correctly chosen. Use-by is a safety date for perishable food; best-before is quality. A fresh cream cake takes use-by. A shortbread takes best-before. Getting this wrong is one of the more common findings at inspection.
Storage conditions stated where they matter — “keep refrigerated” on anything that needs it.
Shelf life justified. You should be able to explain why you chose the date you chose. For ambient products this is usually a judgement based on the product type; for chilled products it needs more care.
Date applied at the point of packing, not the point of sale.

Section 4 — Business identity and traceability

Name and address of the food business operator on the label or packaging.
Registration with your local authority as a food business — free, and required at least 28 days before you start trading.
Records showing which batch went where, sufficient to withdraw product if something goes wrong.
A written allergen policy, even a short one, that staff can actually follow.

Section 5 — The process around it

Recipe changes trigger label changes. There is a documented step between “we changed the recipe” and “we printed new labels”.
Anyone who packs has been briefed on allergens and cross-contamination, and you can show it.
Cross-contamination controls are real: separate utensils or a cleaned-down schedule, and an honest position on what you cannot guarantee.
Old labels are destroyed when a recipe changes, so a superseded label cannot be used by accident.

What environmental health actually asks

Officers are not trying to catch you out. In practice the questions cluster around evidence rather than paperwork elegance: show me the ingredient spec for this, what happens when your flour supplier changes, who wrote this label and when. A producer who can answer those three from a system rather than from memory is in good shape regardless of how tidy the folder looks.

The most common genuine failures we see reported are mundane: an ingredient list in recipe order rather than weight order, a compound ingredient left unbroken, and a label that was correct when printed but wrong by the time it was used. All three are process problems, not knowledge problems.

Doing this without a spreadsheet

Nothing above requires software. It requires that ingredient data, recipes and labels stay in step with each other, which is exactly what manual systems are worst at. The failure mode is always the same: the recipe changes, and the label does not.

FoodCore’s Natasha’s Law labelling software builds the label from the recipe rather than storing it separately, so a change to an ingredient propagates to every recipe that uses it and every label generated from those recipes. Allergens are recorded once at ingredient level and inherited automatically, including through sub-recipes. If you want to check your labels against the requirements first, the free PPDS label checklist covers the label elements on their own.

Frequently asked questions

Does Natasha’s Law apply to a cake shed or honesty box? Yes, if the cakes are packed before the customer takes them, which they almost always are in an unattended setting. Our cake shed FAQ covers the wider rules.

Do I need to list allergens if I only sell at a market? If the food is packed in advance and enclosed, yes. If you cut and wrap to order in front of the customer, it is not PPDS — but you must still be able to give accurate allergen information on request.

Can I write “may contain nuts” instead of listing ingredients? No. Precautionary labelling is voluntary and additional. It never replaces the mandatory ingredient list with allergens emphasised.

What are the penalties? Enforcement is by local authority and is usually improvement-focused first. But allergen offences can carry unlimited fines, and in the worst cases criminal liability follows a serious incident. The point of the checklist is that the vast majority of failures are avoidable process slips.

Natasha’s Law Checklist (2026): Every Item, Explained