Restaurant Allergen Chart: The Big 9 and How to Put Them on Your Menu

Sooner or later a guest asks whether the sauce has nuts in it, in the middle of service, and the answer has to be right the first time. Most restaurants handle this with a laminated allergen chart kept behind the host stand. It works, until the recipe changes. Here is what belongs on that chart, what US rules actually ask of a restaurant, and why the chart is better off living inside the menu.

The Big 9 major food allergens

The FDA recognises nine major food allergens:

• Milk
• Eggs
• Fish
• Crustacean shellfish
• Tree nuts
• Peanuts
• Wheat
• Soybeans
• Sesame

Sesame is the newest of the nine. It was added by the FASTER Act, signed into law on 23 April 2021, and the requirement took effect on 1 January 2023. Anything printed before that date is working from a list of eight.

What the rules actually ask of a restaurant

This is the part that surprises operators. FALCPA — the 2004 labeling law that put allergens on packaged food — explicitly does not cover food prepared and served at the point of purchase. Your dishes are not packaged goods, so FALCPA labeling does not apply to them.

What does reach the dining room is the FDA Food Code. The 2022 edition requires the person in charge to demonstrate knowledge of the nine major allergens and of the symptoms of an allergic reaction, and to make sure staff are trained on allergens as their job requires. The catch: the Food Code is not federal law by itself — each state and county adopts it on its own timetable, and plenty are still operating on the 2013 or 2017 edition. Some states also have their own allergen-awareness statutes on top. Check which edition your jurisdiction has adopted with your local health department before you assume anything.

Which leaves a gap worth naming plainly: for most restaurants in most states, publishing a clear allergen chart is not something you are forced to do. It is something you choose to do, because a guest with a serious allergy either trusts your answer or eats somewhere else.

What belongs on an allergen chart

• One row per menu item — every item, including sides, sauces, dressings and specials.
• One column per allergen, all nine of them, so a blank cell means something.
• A clear distinction between "contains" and "may contain" — shared fryers, shared grills, shared prep surfaces and flour in the air are cross-contact, and guests need to know which one they are looking at.
• The date it was last updated, and the name of the person who keeps it current.
• A line telling guests with a severe allergy to speak to a manager before ordering — a chart supports that conversation, it does not replace it.

Why the printed chart goes stale

• Recipes change faster than laminate. A supplier swaps a stock base, someone switches to a different bread, and the grid on the wall is quietly wrong.
• There is usually one copy for a full dining room, kept somewhere staff have to walk to.
• Allergen grids are dense by nature, and a dense grid is exactly what a worried guest reads badly.
• Nobody ever reprints it for a weekend special — which is precisely the dish nobody knows the ingredients of.

Put the allergens on the dish instead

The chart solves the wrong problem. A guest does not want to cross-reference a grid; they want to know whether they can order the thing they are already looking at. Attaching allergens to each dish, in the menu itself, removes the cross-referencing step entirely.

• Show them under the dish, where the guest already is — not on a separate page they have to find.
• Write the allergen names out. Numbers and icons look tidy and read badly on a phone in low light.
• Update them in the same screen where you update the dish, so the two can never drift apart.
• Keep them as real text on the page, not baked into an image or a PDF. Screen readers need it, and so do Google and AI assistants.

That last point has a legal edge in the US too. The Department of Justice's 2022 web accessibility guidance names food and drink businesses among those whose websites must be accessible, and the courts — Robles v. Domino's being the case everyone cites — have treated WCAG 2.1 AA as the working standard. A menu whose allergen information exists only as pixels inside a PDF is a problem on more than one front.

How menu.video handles allergens

In menu.video every dish carries its own allergen selection, drawn from the EU list of 14 allergens. That list is a superset of the Big 9 — every one of the nine appears in it, with wheat sitting inside "cereals containing gluten" — so a US menu is fully covered, with celery, mustard, sulphites, lupin and molluscs available on top. The allergens appear as text under the dish, next to the video and the price, in the language the guest has chosen. Change a recipe, update the allergens from your phone, and the next guest who scans the QR code sees the correct menu.

Accuracy stays your responsibility as the operator — a digital menu makes it far easier to keep allergens current, it does not check your recipes for you. Want to see how it reads on a phone? Scroll the live demo.