What an EHO wants to see when they ask about your labels

An Environmental Health Officer’s visit (routine, or triggered by a complaint) is less about catching you out and more about whether you can show your working. For labelling and allergens specifically, the difference between a five-minute conversation and a long one usually comes down to whether the records are ready before they ask.

What they’re actually checking

An EHO looking at your labels and allergen practice is generally checking three connected things, not just the printed label itself:

1. Is the allergen information on your products actually accurate: does what’s on the label or available to a customer genuinely match what’s in the food?
2. Do your staff know it, not just have it written down somewhere: can they answer an allergen question confidently and correctly, checking a written source rather than guessing from memory, without a long pause?
3. Is there a system behind it: a food safety management system, typically built on HACCP principles (many small UK food businesses use the FSA’s own free Safer Food Better Business pack), that includes how allergens are controlled and recorded, not just a label printed once and never revisited.

The records worth having ready

• Supplier declarations for every ingredient currently in use, not just for the ones on today’s label, but ones you can produce for anything you’re currently selling.
• Training records: who’s been trained on allergens, when, and by what method.
• A written allergen reference staff can actually check against, rather than relying on memory; an allergen matrix mapping products to the 14 allergens is the common form.
• Batch or production records that connect a specific sold item back to what actually went into it: the exact supplier pack, not just “the recipe”, since recipes change and packs get swapped.
• A record of how you handle changes: what happens when a supplier reformulates a product or you swap brands. An EHO asking “what’s your process when a supplier changes an ingredient” is a completely fair question, and “we’d have to go back and check by hand” is a weaker answer than having a system that already does.

Why traceability is the thing that actually helps

The single most useful thing you can produce isn’t a perfect label; it’s a clear trail from a specific thing you sold, on a specific day, back to the exact supplier pack and declaration behind it. If a complaint or a query is about a specific sale, “here’s exactly what went into that batch, and here’s the pack’s own declaration” ends the conversation far faster than “we’ll need to check our records and get back to you.”

This is the same discipline our ingredients list guide and allergens guide both point toward from a different angle: the label is only as good as the trail behind it, and that trail is what an inspection actually tests.

What ProvenBatch keeps ready for this conversation

Every batch keeps its own record of exactly which supplier pack was chosen for each ingredient at the time: a specific label can be reprinted later exactly as it was originally, not reconstructed from a current recipe that may have moved on since. Allergens are detected for you from each pack’s own declaration and confirmed by you, never assumed or auto-ticked, so the trail an EHO asks for is the same trail the app was already keeping: a label derived from your data, with an audit trail, not something built for the inspection after the fact.

Sources

• Food Standards Agency: Allergen labelling for food manufacturers
• Food Standards Agency: Safer Food Better Business