Packaging and Labelling for Meal Prep Deliveries: What UK Law Requires
UK law has specific requirements for labelling food delivered directly to consumers. Here's what meal prep and food delivery businesses need to include on every package.
UK meal prep and food delivery businesses must comply with detailed labelling requirements under retained EU food law and Natasha's Law. Getting this right is both a legal obligation and a key part of the customer experience.
What Must Appear on Meal Delivery Packaging
For pre-packed food sold and delivered online in the UK, each package must carry: the name of the food; a full ingredient list (in descending order by weight); allergens emphasised within the ingredient list; the quantity (net weight or volume); the date of minimum durability ("best before") or use-by date; any special storage conditions; the name and address of the food business responsible; and where applicable, nutritional information.
The Two-Stage Disclosure for Online Sales
Under the FIC Regulation, food sold online must provide allergen information at two stages: before the sale is completed (on your Shopify product page) and at the point of delivery (on the physical package). Both stages are required. A comprehensive Shopify product page and a correctly labelled package together satisfy this requirement.
Meal Kit Labelling
Meal kits — boxes containing raw ingredients for customers to cook — have some labelling flexibility. The kit as a whole must be labelled, but individual ingredient components inside may be labelled collectively. The allergen information must cover all ingredients across the kit. If the kit contains a recipe card, it's good practice (and increasingly expected) to include allergen information on the recipe card as well as on the outer packaging.
Temperature and Storage Instructions
Chilled and frozen meal prep products must carry appropriate storage and handling instructions: "Keep refrigerated. Use by [date]" or "Keep frozen. Best before [date]. Defrost thoroughly before cooking." These are legal requirements, not optional additions.
Display compliant labelling information on your Shopify meal prep store with SaltAI.
Natasha's Law and Pre-Packed for Direct Sale
Natasha's Law came into force in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in October 2021 and introduced stricter rules for food that is pre-packed for direct sale (PPDS). PPDS food is food that is packaged at the same place it is sold — such as meals assembled in a kitchen and dispatched directly to customers. If your meal prep business operates this way, every individual item must carry a full ingredient list with all 14 major allergens clearly emphasised, typically in bold, italics, or a contrasting colour. This is not optional even for small businesses.
Many small meal prep operators mistakenly believe that because their products are homemade or sold in low volumes, the rules apply less strictly to them. This is incorrect. Natasha's Law applies to all food businesses regardless of size, turnover, or trading format. The law was introduced following the death of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse and is enforced by local authority environmental health officers who can issue improvement notices, fines, or prosecution for non-compliance. Taking it seriously protects both your customers and your business.
For online meal prep businesses operating through Shopify, the practical implication is that your kitchen workflow must include a reliable labelling step before every order is dispatched. This means having label templates that automatically pull the correct ingredient and allergen data for each SKU, rather than handwriting labels at the point of packing. Investing in a digital system that integrates with your Shopify product data significantly reduces the risk of human error, which is where most compliance failures originate.
Font Size, Legibility, and Label Placement
The FIC Regulation sets a minimum font size for mandatory particulars on food labels. The x-height of the font — that is, the height of a lowercase letter such as "x" — must be at least 1.2mm on packaging with a surface area larger than 80cm². For very small packaging below this threshold, a reduced minimum of 0.9mm applies. These are legal minimums; for practical readability, especially for customers with visual impairments, using a larger font wherever the packaging allows is strongly recommended.
Label placement matters as well as content. Mandatory information must be in a conspicuous place that is easily visible and clearly legible. It cannot be hidden beneath a flap, obscured by tape, or printed in a colour that fails to contrast adequately with the background. For chilled meal prep deliveries that often use dark kraft boxes or heat-sealed pouches, this means testing your label designs under realistic lighting conditions, not just on screen. A label that looks sharp in design software can become illegible when printed on a matte dark substrate.
If your packaging uses multiple panels — a common approach for premium meal kits — the mandatory information must appear together in one place where possible, rather than scattered across different surfaces. Some businesses use a back-panel label containing all mandatory particulars alongside a separate front-of-pack design. This is entirely acceptable provided the mandatory label is prominent and accessible before the customer opens the packaging. Regulatory guidance from the Food Standards Agency provides further clarity on placement for complex formats.
Country of Origin and Provenance Claims
Country of origin labelling is mandatory for certain food categories including fresh, chilled, and frozen beef, veal, pork, sheep, goat, and poultry meat, as well as olive oil, honey, and some fruit and vegetables. If your meal prep boxes include any of these ingredients, you must declare their country of origin either on the label or on accompanying documentation visible at the point of delivery. Failing to do so is a separate compliance issue from allergen labelling and is enforced independently.
Beyond mandatory origin declarations, many meal prep businesses make voluntary provenance claims — "sourced from British farms," "made with locally grown vegetables" — as a marketing tool. These claims are not prohibited, but they are regulated under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. A claim must be accurate, substantiated, and not misleading. If you state that ingredients are British but use imported substitutes when your preferred supplier is out of stock, you are potentially in breach even if the substitution is temporary. Your labelling system needs to account for ingredient substitutions in real time.
For subscription meal prep services where the ingredient sourcing may vary week to week, it is generally safer to phrase provenance claims carefully — for example, "we work with British suppliers wherever possible" — rather than making an unqualified origin guarantee on a fixed printed label. This protects you legally while still communicating your values to customers who care about provenance and sustainability. SaltAI Subscriptions can help you manage variable weekly menus alongside compliant product descriptions on your Shopify store.
Labelling for Subscription and Recurring Delivery Models
Subscription meal prep services present specific labelling challenges that one-off deliveries do not. When a customer subscribes to a weekly meal plan, the contents of their box change each delivery, which means the label — including the ingredient list, allergens, use-by dates, and nutritional information — must be unique to each individual dispatch. A static printed label attached to a subscription box is only compliant if the contents are always identical, which is rarely the case for meal prep businesses that rotate menus to maintain customer engagement.
The solution most compliant subscription businesses use is a dynamic label system that generates a unique label for each order at the point of packing, pulling data directly from the current week's recipe database. This requires your recipe management system, your Shopify product catalogue, and your fulfilment workflow to be connected so that the correct information flows through without manual re-entry at each stage. Manual re-entry is where errors occur, and in a food allergen context, errors have serious consequences for customers with allergies or intolerances.
For businesses using Shopify to manage subscription billing and delivery schedules, the product pages for each weekly menu must also be updated before the purchase window opens, so that customers see accurate allergen and ingredient information before they confirm their subscription renewal. This satisfies the first stage of the two-stage online disclosure requirement described earlier. Keeping your Shopify product data synchronised with your kitchen's recipe data is not just an operational convenience — it is a legal requirement for online food businesses under UK food information law.
Record-Keeping and Supplier Documentation
Accurate labelling depends entirely on accurate underlying data, and accurate data depends on robust supplier documentation. For every ingredient you use, you should hold a current specification sheet from your supplier confirming the ingredient's composition, allergen status, and any may-contain risks from the supplier's own production environment. These documents should be reviewed and updated whenever you change supplier or when a supplier notifies you of a recipe or process change, which happens more often than most small food businesses expect.
Local authority inspectors carrying out food hygiene or labelling audits will typically ask to see your ingredient specifications alongside your finished product labels. If you cannot demonstrate that your label accurately reflects your current ingredient inputs, you are at risk of a compliance notice even if no customer has been harmed. Building a simple document management system — even a well-organised shared folder — where specs are filed by ingredient and dated is an achievable baseline for a small meal prep operation.
For allergen cross-contamination risks, the same rigour applies. If your kitchen handles nuts and you cannot guarantee segregation, your labels must carry an appropriate advisory such as "made in a kitchen that handles nuts." These advisories are not legally mandated in all cases, but omitting them when a genuine risk exists creates significant liability. The Food Standards Agency's guidance on allergen labelling for food businesses, available on their website, provides a useful starting framework that every UK meal prep operator should read and keep on file.
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SaltAI Team
SaltAI builds focused Shopify apps for food merchants and general merchants. Every app is tested in production at a real food store — including Vanda's Kitchen — before it ships.