Reading labels with a food allergy

Most of this website is about ingredients that probably do not matter much. This page is not. If you or someone you cook for has a food allergy, the label is doing safety work, and it is worth knowing exactly how far that work extends.

The short version: allergen declaration is the strongest, most reliable part of a food label. What happens in the factory is not on the label at all. Almost every practical problem lives in that gap.

What the label actually guarantees

In the United States, the major food allergens must be declared plainly, either in the ingredient list or in a “Contains” statement. There are nine: milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame, which was added under the FASTER Act with effect from 1 January 2023.

In the EU and the UK, the equivalent set has fourteen entries and must be emphasised within the ingredient list itself, usually in bold, under Regulation 1169/2011.

The practical consequence is the same in both places. A declared allergen cannot hide behind a technical name. If a product contains milk protein, the word milk appears. That is a real, enforceable guarantee, and it is why the ingredient list is worth more than any front-of-pack claim.

What the label does not tell you

What else was made on that line. Cross-contact happens in production, and “may contain traces” statements are, in most markets, voluntary. Their absence is not a guarantee. Their presence is not a measurement. This is the single largest gap between what a label says and what you need to know, and no app can close it, ours included.

How much is in there. Position in the list tells you roughly how much, because ingredients run in descending order by weight. For an allergy, that is often not the useful question anyway.

Whether the recipe changed last month. It is the reason to re-read a label on a product you have bought for years, and the reason a barcode database can be confidently wrong while the label in your hand is right.

The names to know

Some allergens travel under names that do not contain the allergen word, which is where a scanner earns its keep.

Casein is milk. So are caseinate, sodium caseinate and calcium caseinate, and they turn up in products labelled “non-dairy”, which is not a synonym for milk-free.

Hydrolysed wheat protein is wheat, and it appears in cosmetics as often as in food. It is also the clearest example anywhere of a cosmetic ingredient causing a food allergy, which is worth reading on its own page.

Carmine is an insect-derived red colour that must be declared by name. It is not one of the nine major US allergens, so it gets no “Contains” statement, and reactions to it are documented.

Soy lecithin is the reassuring one. It is derived from soy and must be declared, and the guidance is that most soy-allergic people tolerate it. That is a genuinely different situation from the three above, and pretending otherwise would waste your attention.

Where an app helps and where it does not

Pura reads the ingredient list and checks it against the allergens you have entered, including for other people in your household. What it is good for is speed and the names you would not recognise, particularly on a product from a country whose labelling conventions you do not know.

What it cannot do is see inside a factory. It cannot detect cross-contact, it cannot detect a mislabelled product, and it cannot detect what happened to a product after it left the line.

The habit worth building

Read the ingredient list before the front of the pack, because the front is an advertisement and the back is a document. Re-read products you already trust when the packaging design changes, because a redesign often accompanies a reformulation. And learn the aliases for your own allergen specifically, since that is a short list and it is the part a label will not spell out for you.

The general mechanics of ordering, collective terms and what claims legally mean are in how to read an ingredient label.