Bakers' food labels: everything that has to be on one

There is no single "food label". What the law asks for depends on how the food reaches the person eating it. A baker can easily be producing three different kinds of label in one week — one for the wholesale order, one for the cabinet, one for nothing at all because the item is sold loose.

This is the map.

Three categories, three sets of rules

Prepacked food is packed before it is offered for sale, and sold somewhere other than where it was made — a wholesale account, a farm shop, a delivery you post. This has the heaviest requirements.

Prepacked for direct sale (PPDS) is packed on site, before the customer asks for it, and sold on that same site. A wrapped scone in your own cabinet. This is the Natasha's Law category.

Non-prepacked is loose or packed at the point of sale — a cake boxed while the customer waits, a loaf handed over in a paper bag. The lightest requirements, but not none.

Get this classification right first. Everything else follows from it, and a label built for the wrong category is either illegal or needlessly expensive.

What a full prepacked label needs

For food sold prepacked at arm's length, the pack must carry:

The name of the food — descriptive, not just a brand name
An ingredient list in descending order of weight
The 14 allergens emphasised within that list
Quantitative ingredient declaration (QUID) — the percentage of an ingredient named or pictured on the front. "Cherry Bakewell" needs a cherry percentage.
Net quantity in metric
A date mark — "use by" for food that is a safety risk once it turns, "best before" for quality. Most baked goods are best before.
Storage conditions where they matter
The name and address of the food business responsible for the food
Country of origin where its absence would mislead
A nutrition declaration — energy, fat, saturates, carbohydrate, sugars, protein, salt, per 100g

Small producers get one significant break: food sold directly to the final consumer in small quantities by the producer is generally exempt from the mandatory nutrition declaration. Selling into a shop is not that. Selling from your own stall usually is. The exemption is narrower than most bakers assume, so check it rather than inherit it from a Facebook group.

What a PPDS label needs

Much less: the name of the food, and a full ingredient list with the allergens emphasised. That is the requirement.

Everything else — weight, date, your address — is optional, and often worth adding anyway. Just know which parts are the law and which parts are good practice, because those two things behave differently when something goes wrong.

What non-prepacked needs

Allergen information has to be available, but it does not have to be on a label. It can be on a menu, a chalkboard, a folder behind the counter, or given verbally — provided there is a clearly visible sign telling customers where to ask.

Verbal-only works in a staffed shop. It does not work in an unattended bake shed, and it does not work for anything sold at a distance.

The rule everyone breaks: compound ingredients

If an ingredient is itself made of several things, you generally have to declare what those things are. A label reading "flour, butter, chocolate chips, eggs" is almost always incomplete, because chocolate chips are cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter and usually soya lecithin — and soya is one of the 14.

Break the compound down, or name it followed by its own ingredients in brackets. This is where nearly every incorrect allergen declaration starts: not with a baker forgetting the nuts they added, but with one not knowing what was in the thing they bought.

The practical fix is to hold allergen data at the ingredient level — recorded once, from the supplier's own specification — so the recipe can compute the label instead of you retyping it. That is the model BakeCheck is built on.

Allergens must be emphasised, not just present

Emphasis is a legal requirement, not a formatting preference. Bold, capitals, contrasting colour, or underline — any of these, applied consistently, and distinct from the surrounding text.

A label listing "wheat flour" in the same weight as everything else has declared the allergen but not emphasised it. That is a defect, and it is one an environmental health officer will spot in about two seconds.

For the full list and how to word each one, see the 14 allergens.

Distance selling has its own trap

Sell online, by phone, or by message, and allergen information has to be available twice: before the customer commits to buying, and again with the food when it arrives. A perfect label on the box does not satisfy the first half. The information has to be on the listing too, without charge.

Where to put your effort

Most of the work in labelling is not producing the sticker. It is knowing that the sticker is right, and being able to show why six months later. Ingredient data from the supplier, a recipe that recomputes when an ingredient changes, an approval step before anything prints, and a version history you can point at.

That is the part worth systematising. The printing is the easy bit — covered in label printing for small bakeries.

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