Allergens on your menu: the fourteen groups and how to state them
Every food business in the EU has to be able to say which of the fourteen allergen groups a dish contains. Here is how to keep that information current without repeating it every shift.
The obligation is to be able to answer
EU Regulation 1169/2011 lists fourteen allergen groups — cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, peanuts, soybeans, milk, tree nuts, celery, mustard, sesame, sulphur dioxide and sulphites, lupin, and molluscs — and a food business must be able to tell a guest which of them a dish contains. For unpackaged food the information may be given in writing or by staff, as long as it is reliable and the guest is told where to ask.
Vietnamese kitchens have their own cases to watch
Fish sauce is fish. Oyster sauce is molluscs. Hoisin and many marinades are soy, often with sesame. Peanuts appear in sauces and as a garnish, and a wok that fried peanuts a minute ago is not an empty wok. Rice noodles are usually fine for gluten, but the soy sauce standing beside them may not be.
Record it against the recipe, not the dish name
Allergens come from ingredients, so the reliable place to record them is where the recipe lives. When a supplier changes a product, that change reaches your menu only if somebody reads the label. Build the check into goods receiving rather than into the evening rush.
Blank does not mean safe
An item with no allergen information is not a dish containing no allergens; it is a dish nobody has filled in. Treat the two as different everywhere: on the printed menu, in the catalogue, and when a member of staff answers. The worst possible outcome is a system that teaches the team that silence means it is fine.
Say what you cannot promise
A small kitchen with shared pans, a shared fryer, and shared surfaces cannot promise the absence of a trace. That does not make the information useless — it adds one honest sentence to the answer. Tell the guest what is in the dish, tell them what your kitchen cannot rule out, and let them decide.
Keep one source and let every surface read it
The printed menu, the QR menu, and the answer at the table should come from the same record, or they will drift apart within a month. In Sen Kasa the allergen list is part of the catalogue item, so the portal, the CSV export your accountant or agency works with, and the guest QR menu all show the same information.