The rule every European restaurant has to follow
Since 13 December 2014, EU Regulation No 1169/2011 has required every food business in the European Union to tell guests which of the 14 major allergens each dish contains. It applies without exception: a two-table trattoria, a food truck, a hotel buffet, a delivery-only kitchen. If you serve food, the rule is yours.
Two details catch most restaurants out.
The information must be written. A waiter who knows the recipes by heart is not compliance. The regulation expects allergen information at the point where the guest chooses — the menu, a board, a printed sheet handed over with it.
"May contain traces of" does not count. Precautionary wording is voluntary and does not satisfy the requirement. You have to state what is actually in the dish.
The 14 allergens
- Cereals containing gluten (wheat, rye, barley, oats, spelt, kamut)
- Crustaceans
- Eggs
- Fish
- Peanuts
- Soybeans
- Milk (including lactose)
- Nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, cashews, pecans, Brazil nuts, pistachios, macadamias)
- Celery
- Mustard
- Sesame seeds
- Sulphur dioxide and sulphites above 10 mg/kg
- Lupin
- Molluscs
Why this is painful on a printed menu
Fourteen allergens across forty dishes is a lot of information to fit on paper. Restaurants usually resort to one of three workarounds, and each has a cost.
Numbers or symbols next to each dish, with a legend at the bottom. It works, but the menu turns into a spreadsheet. Guests squint at superscripts instead of reading your food descriptions.
A separate allergen folder kept behind the bar. Legal, but nobody asks for it. Guests with a real allergy have to announce it, which many find awkward, and your staff has to interrupt service to fetch a binder.
Reprinting whenever a recipe changes. You swapped the oil, added a garnish, changed suppliers — and the printed sheet is now wrong. Most kitchens change something monthly. Few reprint monthly.
The underlying problem is that paper has a fixed amount of space and a fixed moment of truth: the day it went to the printer.
How a digital menu changes the maths
On a phone screen the constraint disappears. Each dish gets its own detail view, so allergen information sits with the dish it belongs to rather than being compressed into a footnote. The guest taps a dish and reads what is in it — no legend, no folder, no conversation with the waiter.
Three practical consequences:
Changes take seconds. New supplier, different stock, seasonal recipe — you edit one dish and every guest sees the correct information immediately. There is no window during which the printed menu is lying to people.
It works in the guest's language. Allergen information is only useful if the person can read it. A German tourist in Rimini scanning a menu that says contiene sedano may not know that sedano is celery. On a multilingual digital menu the same dish shows enthält Sellerie — and the risk of a misunderstanding drops to near zero. This matters more than it sounds: allergy incidents in tourist areas are frequently language failures, not kitchen failures.
You have a record. Digital menus carry timestamps. If a guest ever raises a complaint, you can show what the menu said on the day they visited. Paper leaves you arguing from memory.
Doing it properly in practice
A few things worth getting right, whichever system you use:
Write allergens into the dish description, not a separate legend. The guest reading the dish should not have to look anything up. "Carbonara — guanciale, pecorino, egg yolk, black pepper. Contains: eggs, milk." Plain language beats codes.
Be specific about nuts. "Nuts" is not enough for someone allergic to hazelnut but fine with almond. Name the nut.
Cover the invisible ingredients. Sulphites in wine used for deglazing, celery in the stock, mustard in the dressing, soy in the marinade. These are the ones that catch kitchens out, because nobody thinks of stock as an ingredient.
Review when the kitchen changes, not on a schedule. The trigger for updating is a recipe change, not a calendar date.
Train the floor anyway. Written information is the legal requirement, but a guest with a serious allergy will still ask. Staff should know where the information lives and be able to check the kitchen quickly.
What this costs you
Almost nothing, if the menu is already digital. Adding allergen text to each dish is a one-off afternoon of work, and after that it is part of the routine of editing a dish — the same moment you change a price.
Compared with the alternative — reprinting menus every time a recipe shifts, or handing guests a binder they did not ask for — a digital menu turns a compliance obligation into a line of text you maintain like any other.
Getting started
If you already run a digital menu, open each dish and add the allergen line to the description. Start with the dishes containing the eight most common allergens: gluten, milk, eggs, nuts, fish, crustaceans, soy, celery. Those cover the majority of real cases.
If you are still on paper, this is one of the better reasons to move. Not the marketing reason — the legal one. The obligation is not going away, and it is far cheaper to satisfy on a screen than on a printing press.
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