Food allergen management, made easy.

Now that Natasha’s Law has come into effect, it’s vital to have an allergen management plan in place. Don’t forget to consider hygiene practices and allergen-recording documentation — Hubl’s digital food safety diary keeps those records in one place. For more detailed information, check out the Food Standards Agency’s guidelines and recommendations.

Whether you own a coffee shop, bakery or hotel, you are required by law to give consumers allergen information for both pre-packed and non-pre-packed foods and drinks. You are also required to handle and manage allergens effectively when preparing food.

Besides potentially causing customers to fall seriously ill, failing to comply with allergen information requirements can result in reputational and financial damage to your business, as well as action from local authorities.

Hubl’s intuitive module is a digital alternative to your traditional, paper-based food allergen chart. Easy to use, the module allows your team to quickly see which menu items contain allergens and advise your customers accordingly. Having all the information in one place makes it easier to accurately advise customers about all the delicious dishes you sell.

Being paperless, Hubl’s module reduces business costs as you won’t need expensive consumables such as paper or printing ink — trade piles of paperwork from allergen charts for an easy-to-use, smart app.

How it works: you replicate your menu in the app by adding products and their details. For each product, select all the allergens present as ingredients, or where the likelihood of cross-contamination is high. You can also categorise the product as vegetarian or vegan. Once you’ve created your allergen menu, filter its items by allergen or eating requirement to present customers with a tailored list of menu items that suit them.

Hubl tracks all 14 key allergens identified by the Food Standards Agency, from crustaceans and peanuts to celery and sulphites, built on FSA allergen best practice. Each product in your catalogue records what it contains, what it may contain through cross-contamination, and its full ingredient list.

Yes. As well as filtering by allergen, you can filter menu items by eating requirement, such as vegan or vegetarian, to tailor food offerings to individual customers. Staff answer a customer’s question in seconds instead of checking a folder.

Keep one master version, change it at the moment something changes (a new supplier, a recipe tweak, a special) and make sure the copy your team uses is always that master. Paper can work for a fixed menu at a single site. Once menus change weekly or you run more than one site, a digital allergen matrix that updates everywhere at once is the only reliable way to keep it accurate.

Whichever you use, record who changed it and when. An officer will ask.

Four records cover it: supplier specifications for every ingredient, so you know what is actually in the product delivered; recipes with allergens identified; the allergen matrix for the menu customers see; and a record of when it was last reviewed. Keep them together, keep them current and make sure staff know where to find them.

In Hubl they live in one place, linked to each product and dish, with a full change history, alongside your food safety diary and temperature logs.

For food sold loose or made to order, you must be able to tell customers accurately which of the 14 regulated allergens each dish contains, either in writing or verbally with a written notice telling customers to ask. For food packed on your premises before it is ordered (prepacked for direct sale), Natasha’s Law requires a full ingredients list on the label with allergens emphasised.

May-contain warnings are not required by law, but if you use them they should reflect a genuine cross-contact risk rather than a blanket disclaimer.

Yes. Hubl tracks all 14 regulated allergens for every product and dish, flags contains and may-contain separately, and keeps a single live matrix across every site you run. Update a product once and every menu that uses it changes at the same moment, with a record of who made the change. You can try it free for 14 days.

Every time a recipe, product or supplier changes, and at every menu change. Then a routine check, monthly is common, as part of your food safety management system so nothing drifts. Because Hubl updates the matrix at the point of change, the routine review becomes a confirmation rather than a rebuild.