What is Natasha’s Law guidance?
Natasha's Law refers to the official food labelling law in the UK that provides regulatory guidelines and requirements for food allergen management and safety in food businesses.
The law is named after 15-year-old Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, a teenager who tragically lost her life due to an allergic reaction to a hidden sesame ingredient in a pre-packaged baguette.
The PPDS food in question did have any warning or declaration of allergens in its ingredients labelling.
Natasha's Law, which came into effect in October 2021, mandates that food businesses provide clear and easily understandable information about allergenic ingredients in pre-packaged food. The law aims to help people with allergies make informed choices regarding the foods they buy and prevent avoidable deaths.
Read more about the law in our detailed article about Natasha's Law here.
How many allergens are covered by Natasha’s Law?
Natasha's Law acknowledges a total of fourteen (14) food allergens in its labelling regulation for food businesses. The law introduced this allergen list to protect consumers from unwanted allergenic reactions.
The law covers the following allergens recognised by law in the UK and EU:
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- Cereals containing gluten (e.g., wheat, barley, rye, oats)
- Crustaceans (e.g., shrimp, crab, lobster)
- Eggs
- Fish
- Peanuts
- Soybeans
- Milk
- Tree nuts (e.g., almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, cashews, and macadamia nuts.)
- Celery
- Mustard
- Sesame seeds
- Sulphur dioxide and sulphites (at concentrations of more than 10 mg/kg or 10 mg/l)
- Lupin (a type of legume)
- Molluscs (e.g., clams, mussels, snails)
Under Natasha's law, all food producers of pre-packed foods must declare the presence of any of the mentioned allergens in their list of ingredients. This means that producers must have a clear list of the currently recognised food allergens in their recipes.
Get an intuitive solution for managing your recipes and allergens with FoodDocs's smart Food Safety Management System. When you use our software, you can get a Digital Recipe Book.
Log all of your product recipes and information using this feature and get an automatically generated allergen matrix. The allergen matrix creates a detailed list of your products and identifies the present allergen. 
What is a Natasha’s Law checklist?
In addition to detailing the main objective of Natasha's Law, our Natasha's Law checklist highlights the key control measures for managing and controlling present allergens in your products.
This tool is essential for every food business that handles allergenic food ingredients. The checklist typically includes tasks businesses must complete to meet the regulation requirements.
The checklist includes the following key preventive measures:
- All employees are familiar with the law and all the recognised allergens.
- All allergens are presented on pre-packaged food for direct sale.
- Suppliers comply with the law and provide allergen information.
- The allergen control program is up to date.
- The team is updated with revisions to the food safety regulation.
It's essential for food businesses to take allergen management seriously and follow Natasha's Law and any associated allergen labelling requirements. This will help protect the health and safety of consumers with food allergies or food hypersensitivities.
This checklist for food businesses can serve as a starting point for compliance efforts but should be customised to the specific needs and processes.
What is the importance of a Natasha’s Law Checklist?
A Natasha's Law checklist is critical in helping food businesses ensure compliance with food allergen labelling. The main significance of using such a checklist is in its ability to enhance food safety, protect consumers with food allergies, and keep a business's reputation.
Here are some key reasons why you should use a Natasha's Law checklist:
- Allergen control. Implementing a checklist for ensuring safety against allergens can help reduce the risk of cross-contact, mislabeling on product labels, and other issues. Proper allergen control can help decrease the likelihood of legal and reputational risks from non-compliance with labelling requirements.
- Consumer safety. Accurate allergen labelling is crucial for the safety and well-being of these consumers. A checklist helps businesses prevent allergen-related incidents and allergic reactions.
- Brand reputation. Using a checklist shows your commitment to protecting consumers from allergenic reactions. This can help build trust and consumer confidence.
- Legal compliance. A Natasha's Law checklist can help you evaluate your business's level of compliance. It can be used to determine if your business takes all the suggested precautionary measures and complies with food labelling regulations.
- Staff training. A checklist emphasises the importance of staff training in recognising and handling allergenic ingredients. This can lead to increased staff awareness and adherence to allergen management protocols.
- Transparency. Using a checklist boosts transparency commitment in food businesses by mandating the declaration of the potential presence of allergens in food products.
A Natasha's Law checklist is crucial for ensuring regulatory compliance, safeguarding consumer health, and protecting a business's reputation in the food industry.
By implementing and following such a checklist, food businesses can reduce the risk of allergen-related incidents and demonstrate their commitment to food safety and customer welfare.
The information listed in a checklist must come from a comprehensive allergen risk assessment to ensure that it covers every allergenic risk in your food business.
Who needs a Natasha’s Law checklist?
All food businesses will benefit from using a detailed checklist.
Generally, the law only applies to pre-packaged for direct sale products or PPDS products. The law requires food businesses in England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland to comply.
The Natasha's Law checklist would be helpful for the following businesses:
1. Restaurants offering grab-and-go meals (e.g., takeaway restaurants)
2. Food producers manufacturing PPDS
3. Cafes and delis serving PPDS
4. Supermarkets and grocery stores selling pre-packed for direct sale foods
In essence, any business that sells pre-packaged foods to consumers must have a Natasha's Law checklist in place to ensure compliance with allergen labelling requirements. By ensuring compliance with requirements for food labelling, you can provide safe food choices for allergic consumers.
How can FoodDocs help you comply with Natasha's Law?
Controlling food allergens is not an easy task. Cross-contact can happen with the slightest misstep from a food handler, putting customers' lives at risk.
As such, food safety agencies established laws on allergen labelling, such as Natasha's Law, to prevent adverse reactions from consuming allergenic foods from happening again.
As a food business owner, one of your critical tasks is to ensure that your business has allergens controlled and that your team is trained to handle food allergens.
Use FoodDocs' smart Food Safety Management System to get smart solutions for managing allergens and your entire food safety system.
Improve allergen management with the following features from our intuitive software:
- Recipe management with allergen information for managing recipes with allergen
- Employee hygiene checklist for ensuring proper handling of allergens
- Customisable monitoring system for creating detailed monitoring tasks
Recipe management with allergen information
Using smart software, you can upload your recipes and manage them in one cloud system. Quickly find recipes and important information when you log them into our system.
You can even attach preparation instructions or videos in each recipe to ensure that each dish is created equally.
According to the information you upload, our system automatically recognises the relevant allergens in each recipe. With this feature, you will get an automatically generated allergy matrix showing all the present allergens in each recipe. The matrix is automatically updated whenever you upload a new recipe. Use this as your team's reference for managing food allergens.
Food allergy matrix from FoodDocs software
Employee hygiene checklist
Get automatically generated monitoring tasks and checklists using our smart Food Safety System. One of the most useful checklists that you can get for controlling allergens is our Employee Hygiene Checklist.
When you sign up for our smart software, our system will use the information you provide and intuitively create this employee hygiene checklist, complete with detailed instructions.
Use this checklist to record your team's compliance with minimum standards for controlling allergens. In addition, you can also add instructions as videos or images to make the checklist more effective.
Employee hygiene checklist from FoodDocs software
Customisable monitoring system
To make our intelligent software more versatile, you can easily customise all critical functions. From customising monitoring tasks to fit your business needs to creating new detailed forms, you can do all that with FoodDocs' Food Safety Management System.
Add more areas to your Employee Hygiene Checklist or change the format for filling it up. As mentioned, you can create other detailed forms from scratch or one-off tasks in case you need them.
Make more detailed monitoring tasks by setting monitoring frequencies or adding more fields. You can also add appropriate corrective actions in case of non-compliance.
Customizable monitoring tasks from FoodDocs software
FoodDocs' intelligent Food Safety Management System was created to make compliance with strict food safety laws, like Natasha's Law, easier and more manageable for food businesses.
Protect consumers from unwanted allergenic reactions and your brand reputation along the process by adequately managing your recipes with our software. Make allergen management easier with a comprehensive list of your recipes and potentially present allergens. Use this information for labelling your ingredients list and training your team for appropriate food handling.
To know more about how our software can help you manage allergens, book a demo with our specialists!
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Save time on supervising and use automatically filled monitoring sheets
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