Allergen Tracker
The Allergen Tracker holds what is in your dishes, as a matrix: your products down the side, the fourteen regulated allergens across the top.
It Belongs to the Business, Not the Kitchen
Your daily records are kept per Area. Allergens are not — along with safe methods and COSHH, they are held once for the whole account and shared by every Location. Add a product at one site and it is there at all of them.
That is deliberate. A recipe does not change because it is cooked in a different kitchen, and maintaining the same dish separately at four sites is how four sites end up with four different answers to the same allergen question.
The Fourteen Allergens
The columns are fixed, because the list is set in law:
Celery · Cereals containing gluten · Crustaceans · Eggs · Fish · Lupin · Milk · Molluscs · Mustard · Peanuts · Sesame · Soybeans · Sulphur dioxide and sulphites · Tree nuts
Gluten and tree nuts ask for the specific type as well, because "contains gluten" is not a useful answer to someone who reacts to wheat but not oats, and "nuts" is not a useful answer to someone allergic to cashews.
Categories
Products are grouped into categories — Starters, Mains, Desserts, Sauces, however your menu is organised. Categories are labels for grouping rows; they hold no allergen data themselves.
If you run more than one Location, a category can be limited to specific ones. That is useful when one site has a menu section the others do not. With a single Location there is nothing to scope, so the option does not appear — that is expected, not a fault.
Categories cannot be renamed, because products are filed under the category name. Renaming would detach every product filed under the old one. Choose names you can live with, and keep them short.
Filling It In
Work through it dish by dish and mark every allergen the dish contains.
The part people get wrong is ingredients inside ingredients. The allergen is in the dish whether you added it or the supplier did:
- Stock cubes and gravy granules — often gluten and celery
- Mayonnaise and aioli — egg
- Worcestershire sauce — fish
- Soy sauce — soybeans and usually gluten
- Bread and burger buns — sesame on top counts
- Dried fruit and wine — sulphites
Read the label. Do not work from what you assume is in a jar you did not make.
Keeping It Accurate
Update it whenever a recipe changes, and whenever a supplier changes — a substituted product can bring a new allergen in without anything on your menu looking different. That substitution is the single most common way an allergen matrix silently becomes wrong.
Print the matrix and keep a current copy where staff answering customer questions can reach it. A tracker that is accurate but only visible to a manager on a phone does not help the person being asked at the counter.
Why This One Matters Most
Most records here protect you at inspection. This one protects someone from being seriously harmed.
Under Natasha's Law, pre-packed food for direct sale must carry a full ingredient list with allergens emphasised, and you must be able to give accurate allergen information for anything you sell. "I think it's fine" is not an answer. If you genuinely do not know, say you do not know and decline the sale — that is always the right call, and no customer has come to harm from being told to wait.