EU Allergen Rules (Regulation 1169/2011) and Your Menu

If you run a restaurant, café, or bar anywhere in the EU, you're already covered by food allergen information rules — whether you've read the regulation or not. Here's what it actually requires, in plain language, and how most restaurants handle it in practice.

This is general information, not legal advice. Requirements can vary in the details from one country's implementation to the next, so when in doubt, check with your local food safety authority.

What the regulation covers

EU Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 on food information to consumers requires that customers be told, before ordering, if a dish contains any of 14 recognized allergens:

1. Cereals containing gluten (wheat, rye, barley, oats, and related strains)
2. Crustaceans
3. Eggs
4. Fish
5. Peanuts
6. Soybeans
7. Milk (including lactose)
8. Tree nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, cashews, pecans, brazil nuts, pistachios, macadamia)
9. Celery
10. Mustard
11. Sesame seeds
12. Sulphur dioxide and sulphites (above a set concentration)
13. Lupin
14. Molluscs

This applies to non-prepacked food too — meaning a plate cooked to order in your kitchen is covered just as much as something sold in a supermarket wrapper.

What "telling customers" actually means

The regulation doesn't dictate one exact format. In practice, restaurants meet the requirement in one of a few ways: allergen symbols or footnotes printed directly on the menu, a separate allergen chart guests can ask for, or verbal disclosure by trained staff who know the dish's ingredients. What matters is that the information is accurate, available before the order is placed, and easy for a guest to actually get to — not buried, and not dependent on remembering to ask the one staff member who happens to know.

Where restaurants get caught out

A few common gaps we hear about:

• Menu changes outpace the allergen list. A seasonal special gets added, but nobody updates the allergen sheet to match.
• Cross-contamination isn't addressed. A dish itself might be nut-free, but if it's cooked in a shared fryer with something that isn't, that's information a guest with a serious allergy needs.
• The information exists somewhere, but not where a guest can find it in the moment — a binder in the back office doesn't help someone deciding what to order.

How a digital menu helps

The advantage of tagging allergens directly in a digital menu is that the information travels with the dish automatically. Add a new dish, tag its allergens once, and it shows up correctly everywhere the menu appears — no separate sheet to keep in sync, no risk of the printed allergen chart falling out of date the week after a menu change.

This is why allergen and dietary tagging (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and more) is a standard part of every Startling menu page, not an add-on — every dish carries its own tags, visible to guests before they order, and it updates the moment you do. You can see it working on the live demo menu: tap any dish and the allergen information is right there.

Compliance aside, this is simply good service — a guest with a real allergy shouldn't have to gamble on a dish, or interrupt a busy kitchen to ask.