Free Allergy Labelling Software
Positive ID Labelling is proud to provide free allergy labelling software to our customers. Our in-house nutrition labelling software is provided free to all our food labelling customers buying their labels from us.
We also offer a range of complete food labelling packages ideal for sandwich labelling or small food business.
Our Free Allergy Labelling Software
Our free allergen labelling software is called Nutridata. It is our in-house, web-based allergen labelling software, developed in response to Natasha’s Law.
Natasha’s law requires that all pre-packed food for sale direct to customers requires full allergen highlighting.
This law was introduced in October 2021 to protect consumers with food allergies after the tragic death of Natasha Ednan-Laparouse in July 2015.
What does the free allergy labelling software do?
The software works by looking at your ingredient list and identifying any of the 14 allergens that fall into the scope of Natasha’s Law regulations. Those 14 allergens are:
- Celery and celeriac
- Cereals containing gluten, such as wheat, barley, spelt, oats or their hybridised strains
- Crustaceans such as prawns, lobster or crab
- Eggs and egg-derived products
- Fish and fish-derived products
- Lupins and lupin-based products
- Milk, including lactose and dairy products
- Mustard
- Molluscs such as mussels, squid or oysters
- Nuts (specifically tree nuts – walnuts, brazil, pecan, macadamia etc.)
- Peanuts (also known as ground nuts)
- Sesame seeds and sesame-derived products
- Soy, Soya or Soyabean
- Sulphur dioxide and sulphites at concentrations above 10mg/kg or 0mg/litre
These allergens were selected based on scientific evidence from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which identified them as the most common and serious causes of food hypersensitivity across Europe.
The software then transforms these items’ formatting so they will appear as a highlighted item in your ingredient listing. The highlighting can be as simple as capitalisation or emboldening, italicising or underlining, or a combination of all 4.
The style of the font you use for highlighting may be restricted by your labelling software. For simple UPPERCASE highlighting, Label Direct is ideal for labelling your food. For more elaborate highlighting, such as bold and underlining, EnLabel labelling software is the right choice.
The exact wording of the legislation is:
Article 21.1(b) the name of the substance or product as listed in Annex II shall be emphasised through a typeset that clearly distinguishes it from the rest of the list of ingredients, for example by means of the font, style or background colour.
How do you use the free allergy labelling software?
Nutridata is accessed through a website at nutridata.co.uk and is available on a free trial for 30 days. Simply fill in the form on Nutridata, and a trial account will be set up for you.
The way the free allergen labelling software works is a five-step process:
Load Ingredients
Nutridata comes in two flavours – Lite and Pro. The Lite version is our free allergy labelling software solution which just looks after your ingredients, allergens and costs.
Nutridata Pro is a £199+VAT upgrade and also allows you to add the main nutritional values associated with your ingredients. The pro version builds out all the nutrition calculations for Energy (kJ and kcal), Carbohydrate (and sugars), Fat and saturated fat, Protein, Fibre and Salt.
Once ingredients are loaded, you can use an ingredient in any recipe you create. For example, if you only made sandwiches, you can build them all using bread and spread, then adjust the fillings in each recipe.
The system also includes the McCance and Widdowson dataset in case you do not have the ingredient listing to hand.
Building Recipes
To build recipes, you simply create a new recipe and add ingredients. Adjust the ingredient weight to match your normal product and save. This recipe can then be used to build you product.
Our free allery labelling software looks at the recipe and cascades it according to quantitative value. This means all your products are guaranteed to meet your QUID declaration obligations for food labelling – the Quantitative Ingredient Declaration.
Building Products
Building products is simply a case of selecting a recipe and adding additional information to it. This additional information could include:
- Sales blurb to promote the product
- Barcode data, e.g. EAN-13 (any barcode is possible)
- Use-by or best-before choice and the days offset for the food
- Special heating or storage instructions
- Price
Exporting Data
Once your products are prepared, you can export the data in either xls or csv file format. This is compatible with most major labelling software and designed to work perfectly with either of the labelling solutions we promote: Label Direct or EnLabel
Get your free allergy labelling software trial here
Nutridata Lite RRP: £299+VAT
Nutridata Pro RRP: £499+VAT
Free for all our labelling customers!
