How restaurants can help customers with allergies

With around 2,000,000 people in the UK suffering from some kind of food allergy, restaurants have to be extremely careful with the way they prepare, package, display, serve, and handle food.

It can be very stressful for consumers with allergies to dine out, particularly when going to restaurants with set menus or with very limited food choices.

For this reason, it’s a legal requirement for establishments who serve food to inform customers if their dishes contain one of the 14 most common food allergens.

As much as this is helpful for consumers, there’s still plenty of room for error, which has been proven by recent incidents involving well-known food retailers. To help avoid similar, tragic incidents in the future, there are other steps that restaurants should follow to keep their customers safe.

Interactive allergen menus

Menu Guide, an interactive tool used by restaurants to display food allergens in their menus in an easy-to-read format, state that:

The Menu Guide tool allows consumers to view allergen information on each dish before, during, and after they eat. This minimises the risk of consumers making a dangerous choice

of meal. It also makes dining easy on consumers by providing a single reference point, in which all relevant information is stored.

Better training for restaurant staff on food allergens

Restaurant staff must be trained to better understand food allergens and food hygiene so that they can recognise the risks posed by working with food. This training should be provided to all restaurant staff, as it will help prevent allergen/hygiene related incidents from occurring.

This applies to chefs, waiters, kitchen staff, and restaurant managers - as well as organisations like care homes, schools, and hospitals which might not prepare food themselves but who do order food in and distribute it.

We offer a Food Safety & Hygiene Course bundle that is designed to equip all staff for organisations that work with food with the knowledge needed to better prevent food-related accidents and incidents.

The bundle includes:

• Food Allergy Awareness
• Food Safety & Hygiene Level 1
• Food Safety & Hygiene Level 2
• Infection Prevention and Control

You can claim a no-obligation free trial to any of these courses for free today!