If you have a food allergy, you know how important it is to know not only what’s in your food but how it was prepared. Similarly, if you’re a parent to a child with allergies, you know how frightening it is to send them off into environments where they could be exposed to allergens that could harm them or worse.

Only this afternoon my wife and I hosted a birthday party for our son, and at the end had to give due consideration to a couple of his friends who have intolerance to specific foods, to the point that one always carries an EpiPen.

Food labeling legislation has been around for some time, yet injuries, and their associated lawsuits, have still occurred. That’s why the UK introduced what is colloquially known as 'Natasha’s law’, and officially as The UK Food Information Amendment on the 1st October. The law is named after Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, a teenage girl who died in 2016. Natasha’s story made headlines after she bought a prepackaged baguette sandwich at Heathrow airport and suffered a fatal allergic reaction to one of its ingredients. Natasha was allergic to sesame seeds and even though she studied the baguette’s labeling, it included no mention of this specific allergen for Natasha. At the time, there were no strict labeling requirements for allergens, and it wasn’t disclosed that sesame seeds were baked into the baguette of the sandwich.

In response the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) has agreed new legislation to prevent future fatalities and injuries, hence Natasha’s law. The new legislation applies to food that has been prepacked, whether on premises or by suppliers. It only affects food businesses in the UK (and the associated suppliers selling prepacked food in the UK).

This all makes perfect sense on one hand, but on another screams of the sublime to the ridiculous, and something that I struggle to get to grips with. Where have all of these allergies come from? How did my generation and that of my parents’ survive childhood and beyond? What is happening in society now that makes individuals more vulnerable, or did this sort of horrendous outcome occur in the past and nobody understood what was happening or why?

Nut allergies in particular have been extensively reported over the last few years to the degree that no nuts are allowed on planes or in schools, and that kind of makes sense where they could be ‘hidden’ as part of an ingredient, but last week at the cheese counter in my local supermarket I was confronted with stickers to explain that the cheese I was about to buy may contain milk! Where has common sense gone?

The upshot of all of this is that food manufacturers and brands are now facing huge scrutiny, risk and cost to ensure that they comply with the new law or face unimaginable consequences. This law, whilst on one hand totally ethical and just has far-reaching responsibilities and consequences that cannot easily be quantified, but must surely lead to food inflation at a time when we are regularly told how the average man in the street is struggling to keep up as the ‘rich: poor’ divide continues to widen.

I don’t really know how to comment on this new bit of legislation and the corresponding responsibilities, but one thing is certain is that I struggle to comprehend the magnitude of it all and have sympathy for those having to manage it, whilst ultimately knowing that the law has been carefully written and sympathetically introduced to save lives and so has to be right.

Ref: Some content of this blog is copied from https://www.esko.com/en/solutions/brand-solutions