Allergens and dietary filters: help customers find meals they can eat

A customer with a peanut allergy should not have to read every ingredient list to find dinner. Allergens and dietary filters let them tap once and see only the meals that work for them. They order with confidence, and you answer fewer "is this safe?" messages.

Turning it on

The Allergens and Dietary Filters pages come with the Allergens (V2) feature, and the allergen field on each meal comes with Meal Allergens. Both are listed under Active Features or Disabled Features on the Features page, and we turn them on per site.

Setting it up

Customers see a filter for each allergen and dietary filter marked User Selectable. Check yours, in three steps:

  1. Fill in your list. On Meals > Allergens, Seed Defaults adds the nine major allergens your list lacks and our suggested keywords. It shows what it will add first, and never removes or renames anything. Without it, your list keeps only the keywords it already has. More below.
  2. Choose what customers see. Click Edit on each allergen and dietary filter your customers should be able to pick, tick User Selectable and click Update. When you are done, click Save Changes. Only those show as filters.
  3. Tag your meals with their allergens. See "How a meal gets its allergens" below.

Meals > Allergens: your allergen list

A new site's list starts with the nine major food allergens named by US federal law (FALCPA, with sesame added by the FASTER Act): Milk, Eggs, Fish, Shellfish (crustacean shellfish such as shrimp, crab and lobster), Tree Nuts, Peanuts, Wheat, Soy (soybeans) and Sesame. Each is User Selectable, and each comes with suggested Ingredient Keywords, the words recipes use instead of the name: cheddar, cream and yogurt for Milk, mayonnaise for Eggs, tahini and hummus for Sesame. Their Ingredient Match Type is Partial, so "cheese" also catches "cheddar cheese". Above them sits a None entry, which customers do not see. Add your own with New Allergen, such as Gluten or Mustard, and edit or reorder any of them.

Each allergen has:

  • Allergen Name, such as Peanuts, Tree Nuts, Dairy, Gluten, Shellfish.
  • User Selectable: customers can pick it, on the order page and on their account page. An allergen that is not User Selectable does not show as a filter.
  • Ingredient Keywords, one per line: words that mean this allergen. For Shellfish: shrimp, crab, lobster, scallop.
  • Ingredient Match Type: Exact matches an ingredient only when it is the keyword itself. Partial also matches when the keyword is a whole word or words inside the ingredient, so "peanut" catches "peanut butter", but "nut" does not catch "nutmeg".

The order page filters and a meal plan's autofill both use the keywords and the match type, so a meal hides in the same cases in both places (see below).

Click New Allergen to add one, Edit to change one, and the arrows to set the order customers see. Click Save Changes when you are done; Reset Changes undoes what you have not saved.

Under Bulk Operations, Seed Defaults adds any of the nine major allergens your list lacks, and the suggested keywords each one lacks. It first shows what it will add, and it never removes or renames anything, so you can run it again at any time. An allergen that had no keywords of its own gets the Partial match type. Needs the Manager role or higher.

Meals > Dietary Filters: what customers want more or less of

Dietary filters have a name, User Selectable, the same Ingredient Keywords and Ingredient Match Type as an allergen, and one more choice, the Filter Type:

  • Inclusive filters show meals that have the thing: Vegetarian, High Protein, Keto.
  • Exclusive filters hide meals that have it: Pork, Added Sugar. Name an exclusive filter for the thing itself, since customers see it under Exclude meals with:.

A dietary filter matches a meal the same way an allergen does (see below): a tag with the filter's name, in any capitals, or the name or a keyword in the meal's ingredients. The tag can come from your meal tag list or the Allergens field: a meal tagged Vegetarian shows under Vegetarian. To use a tag such as Pork only for a filter, mark the tag Hidden so it does not show as a filter of its own. Tagging meals needs the Meal Tags toggle on the Features page. See How to use meal tags and filters.

How a meal gets its allergens

Tag each meal with the Allergens field on its edit page. That tag is what the filters rely on most. The field offers the names from your allergen list. When you click Save Changes on the Allergens page, an allergen that meals are tagged with cannot be renamed or deleted: the message names the allergen, how many meals carry it and a few of them. Take it off those meals first. A change of capitals only is fine.

The filters also read the meal itself: its name, its ingredient list, its recipe and sub-recipes, and every component of a custom meal, also one the customer can leave out. A meal hides when one of these holds the allergen's name as a whole word, in any capitals, singular or plural: "Eggs" catches "hard boiled egg" but not "eggplant". A longer word that ends in the name counts too, so "buttermilk" counts for Milk, unless that word is another allergen, dietary filter or keyword on your list ("shellfish" counts for Shellfish, not Fish). "Gluten-free" and "no peanuts" do not count. The suggested keywords (from Seed Defaults, or on a new site from the start) catch what the name does not, such as "cheddar" for Milk; a list without them needs your own keywords or tags for those cases. Look-alikes do not count: "peanut butter" is not butter, and "almond milk" is not milk. A "free" label covers what it describes: "dairy-free cheese" does not count for Milk, and "gluten free bread" does not count for Gluten. Add your own keywords for anything else, with Ingredient Match Type set to Partial, or tag those meals. See How to create meal recipes.

Keywords follow the Ingredient Match Type. With Exact, the default, an ingredient (the text between commas) must be the keyword itself, so the keyword "cheese" catches "cheese" but not "cheddar cheese". With Partial, the keyword can sit inside a longer ingredient, so "cheese" catches "cheddar cheese" too. A meal plan's autofill uses the same check when it picks meals for a customer.

What customers see

  • On the order page, the filters sit in two groups: Include meals with: for inclusive dietary filters, and Exclude meals with: for allergens and exclusive filters. One tap each.
  • A meal's card and its details list its Allergens, in every menu layout.
  • Meals in a menu section set to Ignore Section Filter stay in view, whatever filters are on. When a customer's allergen or dietary filter excludes one, it shows grayed out with a Filtered Out badge and the reason, and it cannot be added. See How to edit Menu Sections.
  • On their account page, under Allergens & Dietary Preferences, customers save the ones marked User Selectable. The order page then starts with their filters already on.

A word on safety

The filters are only as good as the tags and ingredients behind them. Tag every meal with its allergens, keep ingredients and recipes current, check a new meal's allergens before it goes on the menu, keep allergen-sensitive meals out of sections that ignore filters, and keep your own allergen and cross-contact statement on your FAQ page. See How to set up your FAQ page.

Keywords: dairy free, nut free, vegan, food allergy

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