Natasha's Law Explained: What It Is, Who It Applies To and How to Comply

Any food business that packages food on the premises where it is sold, before the customer chooses it, is within scope. That includes cafes wrapping sandwiches for the chiller, bakeries bagging rolls and pastries before display, delis boxing salads and pasta pots, pubs and restaurants selling grab-and-go items, hotels putting packed breakfasts and lunch bags together, school and workplace canteens with a grab-and-go counter, farm shops, market stalls and mobile units that pre-wrap, and any kitchen that puts food into a container and puts a lid on it before the customer arrives. The size of the business makes no difference and neither does whether the food is sold that day. It also covers food packaged on the premises and sold from a temporary or mobile outlet run by the same business, such as a cafe that also sells from a stall at a weekend market. The test is whether the packaging happened at the same site or a site run by the same operator where the sale takes place, before the customer selected the item.

The label on a PPDS item must show two things: the name of the food and a full list of ingredients. The name is the customary or descriptive name the customer would recognise, so "chicken and bacon mayonnaise sandwich" rather than a brand name alone. The ingredients list must include every ingredient, in descending order of weight as used at the time of preparation, with compound ingredients such as bread, mayonnaise or pesto broken down into their own ingredients unless they make up less than two per cent of the product and their own allergens are declared. Within the ingredients list, every one of the 14 allergens must be emphasised so it stands out from the rest of the text. Bold is the convention; italics, underlining, capitals or a contrasting colour are also acceptable. The allergen must be emphasised each time it appears, so a sandwich with milk in the butter and in the cheese shows milk in bold twice. The name of the allergen must be clear: "whey (milk)" or "semolina (wheat)" where the ingredient name does not make the allergen obvious. A separate "contains" statement may be added but does not replace the emphasised ingredients list, and a "may contain" statement is voluntary and should only be used after a genuine cross-contact risk assessment. Other mandatory information that applies to fully prepacked food, such as date marks, net quantity, storage instructions and the business address, is not required on a PPDS label, though many businesses add a use-by date for stock control.

The allergens are set by FIC Annex II and are the same across all food law: celery, cereals containing gluten (wheat, rye, barley, oats and their hybrids), crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, sulphur dioxide and sulphites above 10mg per kg or litre, and tree nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, cashews, pecans, Brazil nuts, pistachios and macadamias). Where a cereal or a nut is present, the specific type must be named, so "wheat" rather than "gluten" and "almonds" rather than "nuts". Sesame, the allergen that killed Natasha, is on the list in its own right and is common in seeded breads, hummus, tahini, dressings and spice mixes, which is why supplier specifications matter as much as your own recipes.

Natasha's Law is enforced by local authority Environmental Health and Trading Standards officers as part of routine food hygiene inspections and in response to complaints. An officer who finds unlabelled or wrongly labelled PPDS food can serve an improvement notice under the Food Information Regulations 2014 requiring the failure to be corrected within a set time, and failing to comply with the notice is a criminal offence. Selling food that is not of the nature, substance or quality demanded, or falsely describing it, is an offence under the Food Safety Act 1990 with an unlimited fine in England and Wales since 2015. Where a customer is harmed, prosecutions for food safety offences have brought fines in the tens of thousands of pounds against small businesses and, in the most serious cases involving a death, prison sentences for owners. Beyond the courts, a labelling failure appears on the inspection report, drags the confidence in management score down and with it the food hygiene rating, and will usually invalidate any public liability claim from a customer who reacted to the product because the policy conditions require legal compliance. The Natasha's Law penalties article sets out the enforcement route in detail.