How allergen information works on Famica Market: what the law requires, what our sellers must state on every listing, how to read it, and what to do when you need to ask a maker a direct question before you buy.

The legal baseline: the 14 allergens

UK food law — retained EU Food Information to Consumers Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, as it applies in the UK — requires that food business operators declare the presence of fourteen substances and products causing allergies or intolerances. The list is fixed, and it is worth knowing by heart if you buy food from any market, not just this one:

Celery; cereals containing gluten (namely wheat, rye, barley and oats); crustaceans; eggs; fish; lupin; milk; molluscs; mustard; tree nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, cashews, pecans, Brazil nuts, pistachios and macadamia nuts); peanuts; sesame seeds; soybeans; and sulphur dioxide and sulphites at concentrations above 10mg/kg or 10mg/litre.

On Famica Market, every food listing must carry an allergen statement naming which of the fourteen are present as ingredients, and — where relevant — a ‘may contain’ note for cross-contact risk in the maker’s kitchen or bakery. Listings that fail to state this are not allowed through onboarding review, and any seller found listing food without a complete allergen statement is suspended until the listing is corrected. This is checked at onboarding and re-checked on seasonal listing changes, because a winter recipe tweak is exactly when a new allergen can creep in unnoticed.

How to read a Famica allergen statement

Every food seller detail page on the market carries a standard allergen panel, and it is deliberately structured the same way everywhere so you only have to learn it once. The first line names allergens present as ingredients: ‘Contains gluten (wheat, rye)’ on a sourdough listing, ‘Contains milk’ on a cheese listing, ‘Contains none of the 14 major allergens’ where that is genuinely the case.

The second line covers cross-contact, and it is written in plain language rather than legal boilerplate: ‘Made in a bakery that also handles sesame and dairy’ tells you more, faster, than a paragraph of may-contain hedging. Where a maker’s own kitchen is single-allergen — as at Dale End Dairy, which handles no nuts, gluten or eggs — the statement says so positively, because a confident negative is information too.

Three practical reading rules. One: ‘may contain’ reflects the kitchen, not the recipe — it means the maker cannot rule out traces, which matters if your allergy is severe and is your call, not the platform’s, to assess. Two: allergen statements sit on the product page and the seller page, and they must agree; if you ever see them disagree, report it through the listing and the seller is stood down until it is resolved. Three: seasonal variations get their own line — a Christmas inclusion bar made with hazelnuts changes the chocolate listing’s allergen panel, and the panel must say so.

Prepacked, direct-sale and distance-selling: what applies here

Most Famica food is sold in one of two legal modes, and it helps to know which. Where a maker sells prepacked food — jam jarred and labelled before you buy, chocolate in sealed wrappers — full ingredient labelling applies, with the 14 allergens emphasised in the ingredients list. Where food is sold at market stalls by the maker — the ‘prepacked for direct sale’ category — the law requires the name of the food and a complete allergen statement, which is why every stall-side label and online listing carries the fourteen-item information even when a full ingredient list is not printed.

Because Famica is also a distance-selling platform — you order online and the food is delivered — the regulation’s distance-selling rules apply: mandatory allergen information must be available before the purchase is completed and at the moment of delivery. That is why allergen panels are on the listing itself rather than behind an email link, and why every parcel carries the allergen summary physically with the food, not just digitally with the order.

The practical upshot: you should never need to complete a purchase to find out what is in the food. If a listing makes you ask, the listing is wrong — and reporting it is not being difficult, it is the enforcement mechanism working.

Asking a maker directly — and why answers are good here

Under the maker-first rule, the person who answers your allergen question is the person who cooked, baked or poured the product. This is the strongest food-safety feature the market has. Rachel Ashworth can tell you whether her kitchen handled mustard seed this week because it is her kitchen and her week. Marcus Oduya can tell you which bars run on dedicated equipment and which share a tempering table, because he runs both.

Every seller page carries a contact route to the maker, and sellers commit to answering pre-purchase questions within two working days. Ask specific questions and you get specific answers: ‘is the lecithin in this bar sunflower or soya?’ gets a real reply, not a ticket number.

Two questions worth asking whenever you buy from any new food seller, here or anywhere: ‘which of the fourteen are in this as ingredients?’ and ‘what else runs through your kitchen?’ The first tests the listing; the second tests the maker. A market built on proximity should make both questions easy to ask and easy to answer — and if it ever stops doing that, the calendar, the journal and the sellers will be the first to say so.

A note on craft listings and the 14

Allergen law applies to food, but the market extends a version of the discipline to craft listings for one obvious reason: materials. Candle pages state the wax and fragrance composition (and that burn-time honesty rule); knitwear states fibre content in full, because ‘lambswool’ and ‘lambswool blend’ are different products at different prices; wooden boards state the finish oil — including when that oil is nut-based, because a walnut-oil finish on a serving board is relevant information for a nut-allergic household even though no law requires it.

That last example is the culture the market is aiming for: treat every buyer question about what a thing is made of as legitimate, answer it specifically, and write the answer down where the next buyer can find it.

A buyer’s checklist for food from any new seller

Familiar or new, every food seller on this market has cleared the same checks — but the habit of checking is portable, and it is the single most useful thing a market can teach. Before you buy food from any seller you have not bought from before, here is the five-point checklist the market’s own onboarding team runs, and that any buyer can run in two minutes.

One: the allergen panel exists and is specific. Not ‘may contain allergens’ — an actual list, naming which of the fourteen are in the recipe and what else runs through the kitchen. Vagueness on allergens is the single clearest signal that a food seller’s paperwork is weak. Two: the food business is traceable — on this market, an FHRS rating with the issuing local authority named, which you can verify on the FSA’s public register in under a minute. Three: the dispatch and storage story holds together — chilled food shipping Monday to Wednesday, packaging that keeps a cold chain, and a listing that tells you how the item travels.

Four: the listing says what happens when things go wrong. A replace-or-refund promise with a time limit — 48 hours on this market — tells you the seller expects to stand behind batches rather than apologise occasionally. Five: someone answers. Message the maker one specific question about the product — an ingredient, a cross-contact detail, a storage question — and judge the seller by whether the answer comes from the person who made the thing, within the stated window.

If a listing passes all five, you have found what small-batch buying is supposed to feel like: a specific product, from a named kitchen, with named allergens, a stated promise and a reachable human. If it fails one, ask before you buy — and if it fails quietly, report it, because every market’s safety net is only as good as the buyers who tug on it.