Dietary and allergen labels

Marking dishes vegan, gluten-free or containing nuts.

Two different kinds of label

Each dish has two groups of checkboxes, and they mean opposite things to a diner. Using them is entirely optional. A menu with none of them checked works perfectly well, and a diner may rely on what you check, so leaving a label off is safer than guessing.

Dietary — vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, low sodium. These say this dish is suitable for you.
Contains — peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, fish, dairy, eggs, soy, sesame. These say this dish contains something.

Whatever you check shows as a short italic line under the dish, like Vegan, Gluten-Free · Contains peanuts, tree nuts, on the card and again when a diner opens it.

Diners can filter on both. Checking a dietary label narrows the menu to those dishes; checking an allergen hides the dishes containing it.

Filter options only appear for labels you've actually used. If nothing on your menu is marked vegan, there's no "Vegan" option in the search box. Tag one dish and it appears; untag it and it goes. A filter full of options that match nothing is worse than no filter.

If your restaurant is halal or kosher

Say so about the restaurant: in your banner heading or tagline, or on your About page, where you can also name who certifies you. That covers everything you serve, and says more than a note on any one dish.

Substitutions available

A third checkbox, and not a dietary one. It flags that you're happy to adapt the dish. It joins the end of the same line and stays out of the filter, since "we'll adjust this" isn't something a diner can filter on.

The allergy notice

Every menu we host carries a short allergy notice underneath, telling diners that dietary and allergen information comes from the restaurant and to check with staff before ordering. Under Administration → Site Content you can write your own wording. Leave the box blank and it uses ours.

The notice itself can't be switched off. It's the only allergy warning your diners ever see, so it stays. Our Terms of Service cover this in section 3.

It's site-wide rather than per-dish on purpose. Cross-contamination is a property of your kitchen, not of any one plate, and you shouldn't have to check "shared kitchen" on sixty dishes. It also sits outside the search filter, so a diner searching for "soup" can't hide an allergy warning by accident.

A word on accuracy

These labels are only as accurate as what's checked. Marking something gluten-free is a statement a diner may rely on, so be careful with "free from" claims in a kitchen where the ingredient is present elsewhere.

None of it is required, so when in doubt, leave it off. An unchecked label means you haven't said either way, and a diner who needs to know will ask. A wrong one is a promise you didn't mean to make. Labeling the handful of dishes you're certain about is worth more than labeling all of them approximately.