UKHospitality: Allergen awareness

Chief executive Kate Nicholls on UKHospitality’s updated and enhanced Industry Guide to Good Hygiene Practice...

While energy costs remain front and centre of the myriad issues facing hospitality right now, we mustn’t lose sight of other matters that are equally pressing, including one that’s particularly relevant for contract caterers – allergen management. UKHospitality is leading the sector’s approach to this critical subject, and continues to work hard to highlight our position to MPs, peers and relevant authorities.

Hospitality businesses take allergen management extremely seriously, doing everything in their power to be transparent with customers about ingredients. It’s our aim to ensure that everyone can enjoy eating out with confidence that their allergies are recognised and catered for.

Crucially, while all businesses make allergen information available for customers, the overarching message we receive from operators large and small is that dialogue between staff and customers is the most valuable and effective way to cater for people with allergies, to best understand the nature and severity. And it’s important that feedback from this sort of interaction is passed back to contract caterers by the hospitality businesses, venues and other outlets that use them.

The tragic deaths of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse and Owen Carey due to severe allergic reactions have rightly shone a light on allergens policy and legislation. UKHospitality supports the broad aims of petitions presented to the House of Commons in keeping customers safe.

Ahead of last month’s Parliamentary debate on Owen’s Law – concerning a proposed change to the law on allergen labelling – we briefed the MP chairing the debate and said that flexibility is crucial to enabling the best approach to customer safety; while a prescribed, rigid approach in all circumstances could prevent us achieving the goal of keeping customers safe. Because, as contract caterers will know only too well, one of the challenges hospitality businesses face is the volatility that currently exists within the supply chain, with many businesses having to regularly substitute products and manage new ingredients.

UKHospitality recently updated and enhanced our Industry Guide to Good Hygiene Practice for the catering sector with a specific focus on allergens and hypersensitivity. The guide is one example of how we’re leading the hospitality sector’s response to allergen management, and has been developed with the input of the Food Standards Agency (FSA), Food Standards Scotland (FSS), local authority environmental health practitioners, interest groups and many other stakeholders.

The only industry food hygiene guide officially recognised by the FSA and FSS, ours is a one-stop document detailing standards for compliance and best practice required for all catering businesses. The go-to guide for food enforcement officers when inspecting businesses, and with customer safety being the key priority, it’s freely available to the entire industry and enforcement community, and can be downloaded from: ukhospitality.org.uk/page/CateringGuideform22.

Going forward, a ‘single source of truth’ to provide all information on calories, fats, sugars and allergens, from the beginning of the production process to the hospitality business at the end of the supply chain, would be a helpful tool in assisting businesses on the frontline provide, providing up-to-date and accurate information to consumers.

The scale and challenges involved in such a project are, of course, massive, and in order to be effective would have to include the whole of the UK food supply chain. This is an area that we are interested in exploring with stakeholders in the future.

In tandem with our guide and the above workstreams, UKHospitality and the wider sector will continue to work collaboratively with hospitality businesses; suppliers, including contract caterers; online delivery platforms; the FSA; customer representative bodies; and charities to ensure that we develop the most effective and workable solutions when it comes food hypersensitivity. This includes collaborating with the FSA’s continuing hypersensitivity work, with a focus on smaller businesses, and raising awareness about the current law and responsibilities concerning allergens.

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