Managing allergens in catering and hospitality

No-one could doubt its importance but, unless you work in the industry, it is hard to imagine how tricky managing allergens in catering and hospitality businesses can be. Responding to food trends and customer demands necessitates regular menu, supplier and service style changes. Managing risks and making sure that staff follow allergen controls and correctly communicate information to customers with allergies, can cause responsible operators sleepless nights. Fortunately, what constitutes good practice in managing allergens in catering and hospitality businesses has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years. We have shared some examples of good practice below.

Train your teams on allergen management

Allergen management is dependent on humans, and humans make errors. Sometimes due to lack of care, but often due to not knowing better.

Make sure all new starters and agency staff are given allergy awareness training on their first day and know to report to their manager straightaway if they become aware that a customer may have allergies, so that the correct procedure can be followed.

There are some great food allergy awareness e-learning courses available that will ensure staff understand the reasons why allergen controls are so important instead of seeing customers with allergies as ‘fussy’ or difficult.

Identify those in your organisation that need an enhanced level of allergen training, such as those responsible for:

• Food preparation
• Serving people with allergies

Do not forget the less obvious staff whose lack of enhanced allergen management training could still have dire consequences. For example, those responsible for:

• Procuring and approving new suppliers
• Menu development and design
• Populating recipe management software
• Collating ingredient information for allergen matrices
• Taking bookings
• Organising events
• Website and social media content

An ideal course is the Level 3 Award in Food Allergen Management which is a one-day workshop to teach your teams to hazard spot and to predict mistakes that could lead to serious allergen incidents. They present a great opportunity for those working in various parts of the business to get together and better understand each other’s roles in this critical area of safety. They should be held face-to-face or streamed but should not be substituted with a generic online course.

Designate allergy leads

Choose and train allergy leads:

• Make front of house allergy leads responsible for supervising the order taking from and the service of their food and drink to people with allergies and liaising with back of house allergy leads to ensure that they have the correct information.
• Make back of house allergy leads responsible for supervising the preparation of food for people with allergies, and liaising with front of house allergy leads to ensure that these orders reach the correct customer.

Your allergy leads will need to know and understand your allergen procedures and menu inside out. They should meet at the start of each shift to discuss the bookings for those with allergies and to communicate any menu changes or other relevant information to the wider teams.

Providing them with ‘allergy lead’ badges will make sure your team know who to refer customers with allergies to.

Make sure that sufficient numbers of allergy leads are available on each shift to improve the user experience of those with allergies. They often report having to wait a long time for their order to be taken, or for their food to arrive.

Encourage dialogue with customers with allergies

A large proportion of allergy deaths occur in teenagers and young adults. It is believed this is because of peer pressure and that they are embarrassed to make people aware of their allergies and may ‘take a chance’.

Making it a service standard to ask all customers if they have any allergies before taking their order and the wearing of ‘allergy lead’ badges can make customers with allergies feel safe and that their allergies will be taken seriously.

Do not forget that if you do not declare allergens on menus, signage or labels, you are legally obliged to have wording similar to ‘if you have food allergies and intolerances, please let us know’ at the point of choice so that customers are aware the information is available.

Review your allergen information regularly

Your supplier is not legally obliged to notify you when the ingredients within a product change, so you should ensure that they agree to do so and how they will do this before taking on any new suppliers.

When ingredients do change, you may need to amend your menu planning software, allergen charts, labels, website, and promotional literature. Ensure that you have a version control/dated system to make it easy to remove any out of date information.

Investigate and record allergy incidents and near misses

It is important to learn from every incident or near miss and to monitor any trends. In order to do this you should have a robust procedure detailing how investigations should take place and who should review the results. This should ensure that the investigation has effectively identified the root cause and that any that any action required to reduce the risk of recurrence is taken.

AllergyWise Improvement Programme

Anaphylaxis UK is working in partnership with Safer Food Scores and Serve Legal to support Business Plus members to manage allergens effectively and to demonstrate commitment to safety whilst enhancing customer trust. A range of allergen risk management services are offered including:

• Quarterly 30-minute online forums to support your teams
• Annual allergen management health check
• Quarterly business forums to share with likeminded peers
• Allergen training courses tailored to your teams’ needs
• Advice on compliance with allergen legislation and best practice
• In-depth brand-wide allergen management reviews
• Customer experience audits to assess allergen communication and service standards
• AllergyWise® accreditation

Please contact us if you would like to find out more.