The food and information amendment (Natasha’s Law) will come into effect in October 2021.

It will require businesses to provide a full list of ingredients and allergen labelling on prepacked food for direct sale.

This new law is being introduced to protect allergy suffers. You may have read about PPDS (Prepacked for Direct Sale) before, these items will need to clearly show the name of the food along with the full ingredients.

All allergenic ingredients will need to be emphasised (bold, italic or a different colour). PPDS foods are foods which have been packed on site before being offered for sale. Items such as sandwiches, baguettes, prepared salads, items from a deli counter that have been prepacked and items such as sausages and burgers sold from your butcher counter.

You will need to make sure that your existing labelling hardware/software is capable of listing the ingredients and highlighting the allergies.

You may already have the correct hardware/software but you may need to look at ordering larger label stock to support the extra text.

Open Retail Solutions are authorised partners of both Avery Berkel and Bizerba and as such can offer help and guidance on the scales and put you in touch with the right people to help further.

Open Retail Solutions EPOS system has the option to print to zebra desktop printers.

Each of these can print multiple label formats so you can be sure that we can help you find the best suitable printer for the job.

Our software allows you the highlight text bold so all allergens can be highlighted correctly.

Once you are happy that you have carried out a review of your hardware/software you will need to make sure that your staff have been fully trained on the list of allergies so that they can offer guidance to your consumers.

Below are the 14 allergens that must be highlighted on your food labels.