What the Allergen Labels Actually Say

I did not set out to write this. I was fixing the planner — it was picking snacks without checking anyone's allergy settings — and to fix it properly I had to stop guessing from names and read what the packets actually declare. That meant reading the allergen label on every product I track.

I track 198 products for the planner's prices. 95 of them carry an allergen label — the rest are loose produce, meat and dry goods that come without one.

What came back was more interesting than the bug.

The name is not the label

15 of those products declare an allergen that nothing in the product name suggests. Not a trace warning — a declaration, the bold "Contains" line.

Read that list as a parent packing around an allergy. Rice crackers with sesame. A rice cereal with gluten. Roti with milk. A chicken-flavoured rice snack with milk in it. None of those are obscure products; they are the ordinary contents of an ordinary lunchbox.

This is the whole reason our planner reads labels instead of names. A tag written from the recipe name would have passed every one of these.

"Free from" tells you what it is free from

The free-from aisle is the sharpest version of the same problem. A product named for the thing it removes says nothing about what remains.

A dairy-free pesto that declares tree nuts. A gluten-free bread that declares egg. A gluten-free flour with a warning covering peanuts, tree nuts, milk and sesame. Each of those is doing exactly what it says on the front — and none of them is safe to hand to a child with a different allergy on the strength of that front label.

The warnings outnumber the declarations

Every figure so far has been about declared allergens. The other half of a label is the precautionary line: "may be present", "made on a line that also produces", "packed in a facility where".

46 of the 95 labelled products carry at least one such warning.

Look at the nuts row. 5 products declare nuts. 24 more warn about them without declaring. A parent who reads only the bold line sees the first number. A school with a nut-free policy is, in practice, dealing with the second.

I am not going to tell you what to do with that, because the two honest answers point in opposite directions and which one is right depends on the child. Some families treat a precautionary warning as a hard no. Others would never get a packed lunch out the door if they did. That is a decision for you and whoever manages the allergy, not for a website.

What our planner does with this, and why

When you tick an allergy filter, the planner excludes on declared allergens only. A "may contain" warning does not remove a snack.

That is a choice, and it is worth saying out loud rather than burying it. If precautionary warnings excluded items too, 46 of 95 products would drop out and the filter would return so little that it would stop being useful. So the line we drew is the one a label-reading parent draws at the shelf: the bold line decides, the warning is information you weigh yourself.

Two more limits, stated plainly:

• We track one product per ingredient. The label we read is that product's label. Yours may be a different brand with a different line.
• Manufacturers change formulations. These labels are what the retailer published on the day we read them, and one of our pinned products quietly became a different item this week — same code, same price, different product. If it can happen to us it can happen on the shelf.

So this article is not "we checked, you're fine". It is the opposite: here is how often the name and the label disagree, which is why the packet in your hand is the only thing that settles it.

The data

The label readings behind every number here are in allergen-labels.csv — one row per product, with the declared allergens, the precautionary text, and the date we read it. Published under CC BY, like the price data.

If you want the planner side of this: set your filters and generate a week. Mains, snacks and the shopping list all come out of the same check.