Market stall and celebration cake labels: when you need one

Two situations produce more uncertainty than any others in home baking: the stall, where the same product can change legal category depending on when you bagged it, and the made-to-order cake, where people assume no label is needed at all.

The market stall

A stall is the same site as your kitchen for labelling purposes if you are the person who baked the goods — the operation is yours, and it travels with you. So the PPDS rules apply to anything you packed before the customer asked.

That produces a split down the middle of a single table.

Bagged at home last night → PPDS. Needs the name of the food and a full ingredient list with allergens emphasised, on the pack.

Bagged in front of the customer → non-prepacked. Allergen information has to be available, but it can be verbal or on a board, as long as a clearly visible sign tells people to ask.

Both are legal. They just require different preparation, and the expensive mistake is preparing for one and operating as the other — pre-bagging a hundred cookies on a Friday night to speed up Saturday, and turning a verbal-allergen stall into a PPDS one without noticing.

Decide which model you are running before you bag anything.

The board is not optional

If you work non-prepacked, the signage is a requirement, not decoration. It has to be clearly visible and tell customers that allergen information is available and where. A folder under the table nobody knows about does not satisfy it.

A menu with allergens printed against each item is the strongest version of this, and it removes the pressure of being asked a detailed question with a queue forming. BakeCheck publishes those as QR menus that read straight from your approved label records, so the sheet on the table cannot drift from the labels in the kitchen.

Celebration and wedding cakes

A cake made to a customer's order, delivered or collected, is not PPDS. It was not packed in advance, and it was not sitting out for sale.

That does not mean allergen information is unnecessary. It means it arrives by a different route: it has to be given to the customer, and if the sale happened at a distance — online, by phone, by Instagram message — it has to be given twice. Once before they commit to buying, and again when the cake is handed over.

For most bakers the practical answer is an ingredient sheet supplied with the cake, plus allergen information on the listing or in the quote. Many put a full label on the box anyway. Nothing stops you exceeding the requirement, and a cake being cut up at a party is exactly the moment someone asks what is in it — often when the person who ordered it has gone to fetch plates.

The bit that gets missed

Wedding and celebration cakes get eaten by people who did not buy them and never spoke to you. The person with the nut allergy at table nine has no relationship with your business at all.

An ingredient card that goes with the cake, and stays with it, is the only thing that reaches them. Treat it as part of the product, not paperwork.

Distance selling, in one paragraph

Any sale agreed without the customer physically present — website, phone, Facebook, WhatsApp — is distance selling. Allergen information must be available before the purchase is concluded, free of charge, and supplied again with the food. Mandatory information other than the date mark has to be available pre-purchase too. This catches a great many bakers who take orders through social media and think of themselves as local rather than online.

Practical setup for both

Work out, per product, which category it falls into
Label anything pre-packed, every time, without deciding case by case
Carry a printed allergen matrix for everything on the stall
Keep the signage up whether or not anyone asks
Keep the record behind the labels, so a question weeks later has an answer

The last one is the difference between a five-minute conversation with an environmental health officer and a bad afternoon. Ingredients with sourced allergen data, recipes built from them, labels versioned and approved before printing — see bakers' food labels for what goes on the label itself, and label printing for getting it onto the box.

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