Bake shed labels: what you need on a cake sold from your driveway

A bake shed is the most informal shop in British retail — a cabinet at the end of a drive, an honesty box, a card machine on a shelf. The labelling rules that apply to it are not informal at all. They are the same rules that apply to Greggs, scaled down.

This is the short version of what has to be on the packaging, why, and where people usually get caught out.

The question that decides everything: is it prepacked for direct sale?

Almost every argument about bake shed labels comes down to one distinction.

Prepacked for direct sale (PPDS) means the food was packed on the same site it is sold from, before the customer asked for it. A brownie wrapped in cellophane at 6am and put in the cabinet at 8am is PPDS. So is a boxed six-pack of cookies sitting in an unmanned shed waiting for someone to take it.

That is the situation a bake shed is in essentially all of the time. Nobody is standing there to answer questions, and the food was wrapped before the buyer turned up. PPDS food needs a full ingredient list on the pack, with the allergens emphasised. This is the rule that came in with Natasha's Law in October 2021.

Non-prepacked — loose, unwrapped, bagged in front of the customer — has lighter requirements. But an unattended shed cannot really be non-prepacked, because there is no one there to give the allergen information.

If you are not sure which side you fall on, read the PPDS rules in detail.

What goes on the label

For a PPDS item, the pack needs:

The name of the food. "Chocolate brownie", not "Dave's Special". If a fancy name is the one you trade under, keep it, but put a plain description with it so a buyer knows what they are getting.
A full ingredient list, in descending order of weight at the time of manufacture.
The 14 regulated allergens emphasised wherever they appear in that list — bold, capitals, a different colour, underlining. Something that makes them visibly different from the rest of the text.

Compound ingredients get broken down. If your brownie contains a chocolate bar, the label cannot just say "chocolate" — it has to declare what is in the chocolate, because that is where the soya lecithin and the milk solids hide. This one catches out more home bakers than any other rule.

You are not legally required to put a date mark, a weight, or your business address on a PPDS item — those are requirements for prepacked food sold at arm's length, for example food you post to a customer. Most bakers add a "best before" anyway, and it is sensible: it manages expectations, and it is the first thing a customer looks for.

Why the honesty box makes it harder, not easier

An unattended shed removes the one safety net a market stall has: a human being who can be asked "does this have nuts in it?"

Two practical consequences.

You cannot rely on a sign. A notice saying "please ask about allergens" is meaningless in an empty shed, and "made in a kitchen that handles nuts" is a precautionary statement, not an ingredient list. It does not replace one.

The label has to survive the shed. Condensation, a hot afternoon, a cabinet that gets opened forty times a day. A label that has curled off or gone illegible is, legally and practically, no label. Matt paper and a decent adhesive matter more here than they do anywhere else — see label printing for small bakeries.

Registration, and the bit people forget

If you sell food regularly, you need to register with your local authority's environmental health team. It is free, it takes about ten minutes, and it cannot be refused. Trading from a bake shed without it is the single most common compliance gap we see, and it is the easiest one to close.

Registration is separate from labelling. Doing one does not cover you for the other.

Keeping the record, not just the sticker

The label is the visible end of something larger. If an environmental health officer asks about the brownie you sold six weeks ago, the useful answer is not "here is a sticker" — it is "here is the recipe it was made from, here is where each ingredient's allergen information came from, and here is the version of the label that was on it that week."

That record is the thing worth building. A label you can reprint is a convenience. A label you can account for is what turns an awkward conversation into a short one.

BakeCheck exists to keep that record: ingredients with their allergen data, recipes built from those ingredients, and labels that are versioned and approved before they can be printed, so the one on the shelf is always traceable to the one you signed off.

General guidance, not legal advice. Food labelling rules differ between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Check the Food Standards Agency guidance, and your local authority, for your own situation.