If an organiser or an environmental health officer has told you that written allergen information is compulsory on your market stall, they have overstated it. The legal minimum is still that the information can be provided by any means, including verbally, as long as a sign tells customers to ask. What has changed is what the regulator considers good practice, and its own guidance comes up for review next month.

The distinction is worth getting right in both directions. A trader who thinks written menus are mandatory may spend money they did not need to spend. A trader who dismisses the guidance entirely is out of step with what the Food Standards Agency and customers now expect, and that gap is the one that closes when rules change.

Market stalls are named, and so are the smallest businesses

There is no ambiguity about whether this is aimed at you. The FSA's best practice guidance on allergen information for non-prepacked foods names the sector directly, listing coffee shops, cafés, restaurants, fast food outlets, delis, butchers, bakeries and market stalls among the businesses it is intended to support.

It also closes off the usual escape hatch. The guidance says it is relevant to businesses of all sizes including small and micro enterprises. A one-person cake stall is inside the intended audience.

What best practice asks for

The recommended approach has two halves, and the second is easy to forget.

The overarching approach in this guidance is designed to meet the expectation from consumers that allergen information should be: easily available in writing; and be underpinned with a conversation

So a laminated card on its own is not the target, and neither is a chat on its own. The FSA wants the written information there so the customer can read it without having to announce their allergy to a queue, and the conversation available so they can check the things a card cannot cover, such as what else was cut on the same board this morning.

What the law still says

Here is the sentence that traders keep being told does not exist.

The approach set out in this document represents a change in best practice to meet the expectation for there to be both written allergen information and a conversation. The minimum legislative requirement for information to be provided by any means (with a sign indicating when it will be provided verbally) has not changed.

That is the FSA's own wording. Best practice moved. The law did not. If you have a clear sign telling customers to ask about allergens, and you can answer accurately when they do, you are compliant today.

What you cannot do is be vague. There are 14 regulated allergens that must be declared if they are used as ingredients or processing aids, and the duty covers food given away as well as food sold. The guidance is explicit that it applies to all food supplied by a business, including when food is offered complimentarily or otherwise without charge. That catches the taster tray, which is exactly where a market stall is most exposed and least likely to be thinking about it.

The date to put in your diary

The guidance carries its own review schedule, and the next scheduled review date is September 2026. That is the point at which the FSA may push again for written information to become a requirement rather than a recommendation.

Nothing has been announced, and this piece is not predicting an outcome. But the direction of travel is legible: the regulator has already written down what it wants, has said consumers expect it, and has a review due. A trader who builds the habit now is not gambling on anything.

An allergen matrix, in about an hour

The practical version of all this is duller and cheaper than it sounds.

  1. List every dish you sell down the left of a sheet, and the 14 allergens across the top.
  2. Tick honestly, including anything used as a processing aid, and anything that comes in a jar or a mix you did not make yourself. Read the label on the label.
  3. Add a cross-contamination line. If everything is prepared on one board in one gazebo, say so plainly rather than implying a separation you do not have.
  4. Laminate it and keep it on the front of the stall where someone can read it without asking.
  5. Put up the sign anyway. The legal route still runs through it, and it prompts the conversation the guidance wants.
  6. Re-check it every time you change a supplier. Recipes drift, and so do ingredients lists.

If you get a query you cannot answer with certainty, say you cannot be certain. Enforcement sits with the trading standards department of your local council, or in some cases the environmental health team, and the FSA points businesses with specific queries to them. They would far rather answer a question in August than investigate an incident in October.

For the wider picture on trading food at events, our guide to what the law demands when you sell food at a market covers registration and hygiene, and autumn food festivals lists the dates worth applying for.