The 14 allergens, and how to write them on a label

Fourteen allergens have to be declared by law in the UK when they are used as ingredients. This is the list, what it actually covers, and how to get the wording right.

The list

1. Cereals containing gluten — wheat, rye, barley, oats, spelt, kamut
2. Crustaceans — prawns, crab, lobster
3. Eggs
4. Fish
5. Peanuts
6. Soybeans
7. Milk — including lactose
8. Nuts — almond, hazelnut, walnut, cashew, pecan, Brazil, pistachio, macadamia
9. Celery — including celeriac and celery salt
10. Mustard
11. Sesame
12. Sulphur dioxide and sulphites — above 10mg/kg or 10mg/litre
13. Lupin
14. Molluscs — mussels, squid, snails

A bakery realistically meets seven of these regularly: gluten cereals, eggs, milk, soya, nuts, peanuts and sesame. Sulphites arrive with dried fruit, and catch people out in fruit cake. Mustard and celery arrive with savoury bakes and with stock powders.

Name the specific thing, not the category

"Gluten" is not an ingredient. Wheat is. The label declares what you put in, and the emphasis falls on the allergen word within it.

• wheat flour — right
• "gluten" — wrong, that is the category
• almonds — right
• "nuts" — acceptable only if you genuinely cannot say which, which in your own kitchen you can

Same for milk: "milk chocolate", "butter (milk)". Butter's allergen is milk, and butter alone does not say the word, so it is added in brackets.

Emphasis is a legal requirement

The allergen has to be visually distinct from the rest of the ingredient list. Bold is the convention. Capitals, underline or a contrasting colour are equally valid. Pick one and use it everywhere.

Two things that are not emphasis:

• A separate "Contains: milk, wheat" line with a plain ingredient list above it. Emphasis has to be inside the list. A contains line is fine as an extra, not as a replacement.
• Making the whole list bold. If everything is emphasised, nothing is.

Compound ingredients are where declarations fail

Most missed allergens are not forgotten — they are invisible, sitting inside something bought in.

• Chocolate chips → often contain soya lecithin, and milk in milk chocolate
• Marzipan → almonds
• Baking powder → sometimes wheat starch
• Dried fruit → frequently sulphites, and sometimes a flour dusting
• Vegetable fat spreads → often soya
• Flavourings and extracts → alcohol carriers, sometimes gluten
• Glacé cherries → sulphites
• Seeded toppings → sesame

The rule: if you cannot get a specification telling you what is inside an ingredient, you cannot safely label a product containing it. Ask the supplier. They are required to give it to you, and reputable ones publish it.

This is why it is worth recording allergens once per ingredient, from the supplier's own data, rather than deciding them per recipe. Decide once, carefully; let every recipe inherit it. A product's allergen set should be computed from its ingredients, not typed by a person at 6am.

Oats and gluten

Oats contain avenin, not the gluten proteins in wheat, but they are on the list because of near-universal cross-contamination in milling. Declare oats. Do not describe an oat product as gluten-free unless you are using certified gluten-free oats and can control the rest of your process.

"May contain" is optional and often misused

Precautionary allergen labelling covers unavoidable cross-contamination after a genuine risk assessment. It is voluntary.

It does not cover an ingredient you deliberately added, and it must not be used as insurance to avoid thinking. A blanket "may contain everything" on all your products is worse than useless: allergic customers learn to ignore it, which undermines the warning where it is real.

If you do handle nuts in a small kitchen and cannot segregate, a specific, honest statement is appropriate. Make it specific.

Free-from claims carry a higher burden

"Gluten-free" is legally defined: below 20 parts per million. In a shared domestic kitchen with open bags of wheat flour, you cannot demonstrate that. Use "no gluten-containing ingredients" if that is what is true, and say what your kitchen handles.

The same care applies to "vegan" — it is a claim about the recipe, not about milk cross-contact, and it is not an allergen statement.

Making this a system, not a memory test

Allergen labelling fails at the edges: a swapped supplier, a substitution in a rush, a recipe tweaked and a label not reprinted.

The fix is structural. Hold allergen data on the ingredient. Compute the product from the recipe. Refuse to produce a label when an ingredient's allergens have never been declared — blank is not the same as none. Invalidate an approved label when anything underneath it changes. Keep the versions.

That is precisely the model BakeCheck implements, including the deliberate refusal: an ingredient with no allergen information recorded blocks labelling rather than quietly producing a label that says nothing.

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General guidance, not legal advice. See the Food Standards Agency for current allergen guidance, and check the rules for your nation.