Know exactly which allergens are in every recipe you make
Tag each ingredient with its allergens once. MenuCost builds the full allergen profile for every recipe that uses it on its own, so your menu stays accurate and your team is never guessing.
WHY THIS MATTERS
A customer with a food allergy trusts that your menu information is correct. It needs to be.
For customers with food allergies, allergen information isn't a nice to have, it's a safety requirement. A customer with a severe wheat allergy asking whether a dessert has gluten is making a medical decision based on your answer. Getting that right every time is both a duty of care and, in many places, a legal one.
The challenge for bakeries and cafés is that allergen information sits at the ingredient level, not the recipe level. A butter croissant has gluten, dairy, and eggs, but that's only obvious once someone's checked every ingredient and traced what each one carries. When a recipe changes, a supplier reformulates a product, or a new item joins the menu, the allergen profile needs to keep up. Without a system, that tracking falls to memory and manual checking, which is exactly where mistakes happen.
Example: A café launches a new house granola bar using oat flour from a new supplier. The old oats were certified gluten-free, the new ones aren't. Without allergen tracking tied to ingredients, that change is invisible, the granola bar still shows as wheat-free on the menu. MenuCost flags the change at the ingredient level and updates the recipe's allergen profile automatically, so the menu reflects what's actually in it.
Allergen management gives you one reliable source of truth for what's in every recipe, built from your actual ingredients, not a separate spreadsheet or a note someone filled in once and forgot about.
COVERAGE
All 14 major allergens tracked across every recipe
MenuCost tracks the 14 allergens recognised under international food labelling standards, the same set required for disclosure across most markets the GCC food industry operates in or exports to.
- Gluten
- Fish
- Milk/Dairy
- Mustard
- Lupin
- Crustaceans
- Peanuts
- Tree Nuts
- Sesame
- Molluscs
- Eggs
- Soybeans
- Celery
- Sulphites
For each allergen, an ingredient can be marked as Contains (present in the formulation) or May contain (trace risk from shared production). Both get tracked and shown in the recipe's allergen profile.
HOW IT WORKS
Tag ingredients once — every recipe updates automatically
Tag each ingredient with its allergens
In your ingredient library, mark which of the 14 allergens each ingredient contains or may contain. Whole milk gets tagged dairy. Bread flour gets tagged gluten. Sesame paste gets tagged sesame. You do this once per ingredient, not once per recipe.
MenuCost builds the recipe allergen profile automatically
When you add ingredients to a recipe, MenuCost reads their allergen tags and pulls together the full allergen profile for that recipe. If any ingredient contains or may contain an allergen, it shows up in the recipe's profile. No manual summary needed.
Changes at the ingredient level flow through to every recipe
If a supplier reformulates an ingredient, or you switch products, update the allergen tags on that one ingredient. Every recipe using it reflects the new profile right away. One change ripples through your whole menu.
View the full allergen profile for any recipe at a glance
Inside each recipe, the allergen profile shows what's present and what's a trace risk, listed by ingredient so you can see exactly where each allergen comes from. No guessing which ingredient triggered a flag.
See allergen coverage across your full menu
The menu allergen view shows every item with its allergen flags in one table, so you can see at a glance which items carry which allergens, spot what's free from a specific allergen, and answer customer questions with confidence.
REAL EXAMPLE
What the allergen profile looks like inside a recipe
The allergen profile was built entirely from the ingredient tags, no separate entry, no manual summary. Switch the butter supplier to one that runs a nut-processing facility, and updating that one ingredient's tag updates this profile and every other recipe using that butter.
WHAT YOU GET
What changes when allergens are tracked at the ingredient level
- Accurate allergen information for every recipe, always. Since allergen profiles come from ingredient tags rather than being entered by hand per recipe, they stay correct as your menu changes. Add an ingredient to a recipe, and its allergens come with it automatically.
- Supplier changes don't create silent allergen risks. When an ingredient changes, new supplier, reformulated product, different facility, update the allergen tags on that one ingredient. Every recipe using it reflects the change immediately. Nothing slips through.
- Fast, confident answers to customer questions. When someone asks whether something has nuts, sesame, or dairy, your team has one place to check, not a folder of spec sheets or a spreadsheet nobody's touched in six months. The answer is current and reliable.
- A foundation for menu labelling and compliance. If your business needs allergen declarations for packaging, export paperwork, or food service contracts, the data in MenuCost gives you an accurate base to work from, built from the actual recipes you use.
QUESTIONS
Contains means the allergen is actually in the ingredient, butter contains milk, for example. May Contain means the ingredient is made in a facility that also handles that allergen, creating a trace risk through cross-contamination, like sugar packaged on shared equipment that also handles nuts. For customers with severe allergies, both matter. MenuCost tracks them separately so the distinction is always visible.
Tag every ingredient, including the ones you expect to be allergen-free. Marking an ingredient as allergen-free is a confirmation, not an omission. Leave one untagged, and MenuCost can't include it in the recipe's profile, which leaves that profile incomplete. Tagging everything, even just to confirm "no allergens present," gives you a complete, trustworthy record.
For compound ingredients, ready-made pastes, sauces, pre-mixed dry blends, tag the allergens based on the product's own allergen declaration from the supplier's packaging or spec sheet. Same rule applies: set it once on the ingredient, and every recipe using it picks up those flags. If the supplier reformulates, update the tag once and every recipe updates with it.
MenuCost gives you the accurate underlying data, what each recipe contains and may contain, which you can use as the basis for packaging labels or documentation. Formatting that into a specific label layout is a separate step you'd handle yourself, using the allergen information MenuCost provides. Always check declarations against your local food labeling rules before using them.
Yes. Since allergen profiles are built at the recipe level, every item in a catering quote already has its allergen information attached. If a catering client needs an allergen list for every item in their order, you can pull it straight from the recipes in the quote, no separate check needed for catering jobs.
Know what's in every recipe, before a customer has to ask
Join bakeries and coffee shops that manage allergens with confidence.
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