How to label allergens on an honesty box

Why an unattended stall is a special case

The law gives most small food sellers a choice about how they hand over allergen information. If you sell food loose — unwrapped, chosen at the counter — you can either write it all down, or you can put up a notice telling people to ask, and then answer their questions.

You can see the problem. At half past eight on a Sunday morning, at a shed at the end of your drive, there is nobody to ask.

That single fact collapses the whole thing into one rule: whatever you sell and however you wrap it, the written information has to be complete on its own. There is no follow-up question, no "let me check for you", no glance at the packet in the bin. The label is the entire conversation, and it only gets one turn.

Which is why this article is longer than it needs to be for a bakery counter. You're doing something a bakery counter never has to do.

The fourteen

UK law regulates fourteen allergens. Any of them present in your food has to be declared:

• Celery
• Cereals containing gluten (wheat, rye, barley, oats)
• Crustaceans
• Eggs
• Fish
• Lupin
• Milk
• Molluscs
• Mustard
• Peanuts
• Sesame
• Soya
• Sulphur dioxide and sulphites
• Tree nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, cashews, pecans, Brazil nuts, pistachios, macadamias)

Most home bakers can name eight or nine of those without thinking. It's the other five that cause trouble, because they hide:

• Soya is in most chocolate, as lecithin. This is the single most commonly missed allergen in home baking.
• Sulphites are in a lot of dried fruit — so your fruit loaf, your tiffin, your Christmas cake.
• Sesame turns up in seeded loaves and anything with tahini, and seeds migrate around a kitchen alarmingly.
• Mustard hides in condiments, mayonnaise and some sausages — relevant if you're selling savoury.
• Celery is in most stock cubes and in celery salt, which catches out anyone selling savoury pastries or soup.

Read the packet of every ingredient you buy. Not the front — the ingredients list on the back.

Which rules apply to what you sell

Three tiers, and most gate stalls sit comfortably in the first one.

Tier 1: single, unprocessed things. A box of eggs. A bag of potatoes. Apples from the orchard. Where the name of the food tells you exactly what's in it, you don't need an ingredients list — "eggs" has already done the work. This covers a huge proportion of honesty boxes, and if that's you, you can stop reading and go and check on the hens.

Tier 2: prepacked for direct sale (PPDS). This is the one people mean when they say Natasha's Law. It applies when you wrap or box the food before the customer chooses it — a brownie in a bag, a slice in a box, six flapjacks lined up on a shelf ready to be picked. It applies explicitly to people baking at home and selling from home. Every item needs:

• The name of the food — "Salted caramel brownie", not "brownie"
• A full ingredients list, in descending order of weight
• Every regulated allergen emphasised within that list — bold, capitals or a different colour

Tier 3: loose food. Cakes on a plate under a cloche, cut and served by the customer. Technically outside PPDS, so no full ingredients list is legally required — but you must still provide allergen information, and as established above, at your stall that means writing it down anyway.

Which is why the practical advice for honesty boxes is simple: ignore the distinction and label everything as though it were PPDS. The gap between tiers 2 and 3 is a gap for businesses with staff. You haven't got any.

How to actually write the label

Here is a real one, for a brownie:

Salted Caramel Brownie
Ingredients: Dark chocolate (cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter, soya lecithin), caster sugar, butter (milk), plain wheat flour, free-range egg, caramel sauce (sugar, double cream (milk), butter (milk), sea salt), cocoa powder.
Best before: 14 August 2026
Made by Sioned, Pontgarreg.

Four things that label gets right, all of which are commonly got wrong:

• The allergens are emphasised inside the list, every single time they appear. Not gathered into a "Contains: milk, egg, soya" line at the bottom. You may add a summary line as extra help, but it does not replace emphasis within the list — and a summary line on its own doesn't meet the requirement.
• Compound ingredients are broken open. "Chocolate" is not an ingredient, it's four ingredients in a coat. Same for caramel sauce, custard, anything bought pre-made.
• Descending order of weight. Chocolate first because there's more of it than anything else, cocoa powder last.
• A date and a name. Best-before for ambient bakes, use-by only for the chilled stuff. The name isn't a legal requirement at this scale but it makes people trust the label, which is the point of it.

Handwritten is fine, as long as it's legible in poor light by someone who is worried.

The "may contain" trap

Precautionary allergen labelling — "may contain nuts" — is voluntary. It is also the thing home bakers most often get wrong, and the FSA tightened its guidance on it in March 2026.

The current position:

• Only use it if the risk is real and unavoidable. A cross-contact risk you could fix by cleaning down and keeping things separate isn't a "may contain" — it's a cleaning job.
• Name the specific allergen. "May contain peanuts" is useful. "May contain nuts" is now explicitly discouraged, because it's vague enough that people either avoid safe food or start ignoring the warning altogether.
• Never stamp it on everything as insurance. Blanket precautionary labelling is the worst outcome for the person it's supposed to protect. It teaches your regulars that your warnings mean nothing.

And two claims to avoid entirely. "Free from" is a guarantee — to say gluten-free you must be able to promise the gluten is absent, which is not a promise you can make in a kitchen with a bag of flour in it. "No gluten-containing ingredients" looks like a safe halfway house, but current FSA best practice is that it shouldn't be used either. Just list what's in it, honestly, and let the customer make their own decision. That's what they'd rather have anyway.

Cross-contact in a home kitchen

Your kitchen is not a segregated facility, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. What you can do:

• Bake the allergen-free thing first, in a clean kitchen, before anything else gets opened.
• Keep separate utensils and bakeware for it, or wash thoroughly with hot soapy water — allergen proteins are removed by proper washing, not killed by heat.
• Store business ingredients sealed and away from the peanut butter.
• Watch the flour. Flour hangs in the air for a surprisingly long time and settles on everything.

If, after all that, there's a genuine unavoidable risk — you make peanut butter sandwiches for the children on the same worktop every morning — that is when a specific "may contain peanuts" belongs on the label.

The one that catches everyone: changing the recipe

You've run the same brownie for eight months. The label is correct, laminated, perfect. Then the supermarket is out of your usual dark chocolate, you grab a different brand, and that one contains milk solids.

The label is now wrong, and it's wrong in the way that hurts someone.

This is the most common real-world failure, and it isn't carelessness — it's just that nobody thinks of a brand swap as a recipe change. Two habits fix it:

• Read the ingredients on every packet, every time you buy it. Manufacturers reformulate without telling anyone.
• Keep a master sheet — one page per bake, listing every ingredient and its source. When something changes, you update one document and reprint one label, rather than trying to remember what's in the thing you made on Tuesday.

The chart on the door

Alongside individual labels, most well-run sheds pin up a laminated allergen chart: your bakes down the side, the fourteen allergens across the top, ticks in the boxes. It takes ten minutes to make and answers the question a customer would have asked if you'd been standing there.

It doesn't replace the labels. It backs them up, and it's what an environmental health officer will be pleased to see when they visit.

If you get it wrong

Failing to provide accurate allergen information is a criminal offence, and enforcement sits with your local council's environmental health team. In practice, a first problem with a small home baker usually brings advice rather than prosecution.

But the enforcement isn't really the point. The point is that somebody stood at your shed on a Sunday morning, read your label, believed it, and ate the thing. Everything above is just the mechanics of deserving that.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to label eggs and vegetables?

No ingredients list is needed for single unprocessed foods where the name says it all — a box of eggs labelled "eggs" has done its job. Add a best-before date on eggs, and see our guide to what you can sell in an honesty box for the wider rules.

Does Natasha's Law really apply to a cake shed at the end of my drive?

Yes. The PPDS rules apply explicitly to food made at home and sold from home. There is no small-scale exemption.

Can I just put "contains milk, eggs and wheat" at the bottom?

Not on its own. For prepacked-for-direct-sale food you need the full ingredients list with each allergen emphasised inside it. A summary line is allowed as additional help, but it doesn't satisfy the requirement by itself.

What if I sell the cakes loose instead — does that get me out of it?

It gets you out of the full ingredients list, but not out of providing allergen information. Since there's nobody at your stall to ask, that information still has to be written down, so you've saved yourself very little and made your label less useful.

Can I write "made in a kitchen that handles nuts" on everything?

You can, but you shouldn't. Current FSA guidance is that precautionary labelling should only be used where there's a genuine unavoidable risk, and should name the specific allergen. Applying it to everything as a blanket disclaimer trains customers to ignore it.

Do I need a food hygiene certificate for this?

Not legally, though your environmental health officer will expect some training. Our cake shed guide covers registration, hygiene and the rest of the setup.

Where's the official guidance?

The Food Standards Agency publishes free allergen guidance and downloadable label templates aimed at exactly this scale of seller. It's plain English and worth an hour of your time.

This article is general guidance, not legal advice. Allergen rules are enforced locally — if you're unsure about your setup, your council's environmental health team will tell you for free.