Flag allergens

Every product carries flags for all 14 EU allergens, and buyers see them on the storefront and on every drop menu. This is the one part of a product a reader can be harmed by, so the Kitchen treats it differently from the rest of the form: the declaration travels with the product onto every drop, and a drop will not publish while any of its menu lines carries a declaration nobody has confirmed.

The fourteen

Open a product and scroll to Allergens. The grid holds the fourteen allergens of the EU food-information rules, in this order:

Gluten · Crustaceans · Eggs · Fish · Peanuts · Soybeans · Milk · Nuts · Celery · Mustard · Sesame · Sulphites · Lupin · Molluscs

The list is fixed. You cannot add a fifteenth, and you cannot rename one.

Contains, may contain, or neither

Each cell cycles through three states as you press it:

1. Not declared — the plain state a product starts in.
2. Contains — the allergen is an ingredient. The cell turns and carries a warning triangle.
3. May contain — you cannot rule out traces of it, usually because of how you bake. The cell wears a dashed border and the small word may.

Pressing a third time returns the cell to not declared. The two sets can never overlap: an allergen is contains or may contain or neither, never two of them at once. Under the grid, a line counts what you have declared — for example 2 contain · 1 may contain.

Confirm the list

Below the grid sits the affirmation:

I’ve checked this product’s allergens and the list above is correct

Tick it and save. Until you do, the product wears an amber Allergens not reviewed badge in your catalog, and drops carrying it cannot be published.

The tick is about the specific list above it, so changing any flag retracts it in front of you — the block turns amber and says You changed the declaration — confirm it again. Save after that and the confirmation is stamped with the date it was made; the caption then reads Confirmed, with the date.

Ticking is not a condition of saving. A half-built product still saves; what waits on the confirmation is publishing a drop, not keeping your work.

Dietary claims are checked against it

Vegan, Vegetarian and Gluten-free (claim) live one section further down, and they are checked against your contains set: a gluten-free claim cannot sit beside Gluten, and a vegan claim cannot sit beside Milk, Eggs, Fish, Crustaceans or Molluscs. The editor marks the cells the claim contradicts, and the save is refused until one of them gives way.

A may contain flag never blocks a claim — a cross-contamination disclosure and a recipe claim are different statements and may coexist.

What buyers see

On the storefront and on a drop menu, a product’s declaration is rendered as a Contains line naming each allergen, a secondary May contain traces of: line where you disclosed any, and No major allergens declared. where you declared none.

What happens on a drop

A drop’s menu is a snapshot. When you save a drop, each menu line copies the product’s name, price, photo and its allergen declaration, including whether the declaration was confirmed. Editing the product afterwards changes the catalog, never a menu that was already saved.

That has one consequence worth knowing:

Publishing refuses the whole drop and names every line whose declaration is unconfirmed, so a drop with ten lines tells you which ones to fix rather than making you hunt.

Finding the ones you have not done

The catalog’s status row has a Needs allergen review filter. It works on the products of the page you are looking at rather than the whole catalog, and says so — page through to check the rest.