Sesame as a Major Allergen: What Food Businesses Need to Know in 2026
Sesame is now a major allergen in both the US and UK. Here is what food businesses need to know about sesame declaration requirements and the impact on your product labels.
Sesame became a major allergen in the US (under FALCPA via the FASTER Act) on 1 January 2023. In the UK, sesame has been one of the 14 major allergens requiring declaration since the Food Information Regulations 2014. In 2026, any food business still not accurately declaring sesame is non-compliant and carrying unnecessary risk.
Why Sesame Was Added to the US Major Allergen List
Sesame allergy rates have been increasing globally, and sesame is now estimated to affect around 1.1 million Americans. Prior to the FASTER Act, sesame was not a required declaration under FALCPA, meaning it was often undeclared on US food labels. The FASTER Act corrected this.
Foods That Commonly Contain Sesame
Sesame appears in a wide range of products, sometimes in forms not obviously recognisable:
- Sesame seeds (whole, hulled, toasted, black)
- Sesame oil (including toasted sesame oil)
- Tahini (sesame paste)
- Sesame flour and sesame meal
- Hummus (contains tahini)
- Some bread, biscuits, and crackers
Sub-Ingredient Sesame
Sesame frequently appears as a sub-ingredient in compound ingredients — a spice blend, a sauce, a flavouring. Businesses must check every compound ingredient in their product for sesame content.
Updating Legacy Products
If you have products that predate the sesame allergen requirements and have not been reviewed, conduct a full sesame audit of your product range now.
How Sesame Labelling Differs Between the UK and the US
In the UK, sesame must be emphasised within the ingredients list — typically in bold — whenever it appears in a food product sold to consumers. This applies to prepacked food, prepacked for direct sale (PPDS) food following Natasha's Law, and in many circumstances to food sold loose. The requirement has been in place since 2014, but enforcement attention has sharpened considerably, and Trading Standards bodies have become more active in inspecting allergen declarations across both physical and online retail channels.
In the US, the FASTER Act introduced sesame as the ninth major allergen under FALCPA. US labelling rules require sesame to be declared either in the ingredients list using its common name, or in a separate "Contains" statement — for example, "Contains: Wheat, Sesame." Unlike the UK emphasis requirement, the US approach centres on the "Contains" statement convention that manufacturers were already familiar with from the existing eight allergens. However, many businesses selling across both markets have had to update labelling for both regulatory frameworks simultaneously, which has added compliance complexity.
Food businesses selling on Shopify into both UK and US markets therefore face a dual compliance obligation. A product page that satisfies UK allergen declaration requirements may not satisfy US requirements, and vice versa. The safest approach is to declare sesame prominently in both the ingredients information and in a dedicated allergen section on every product page, making the presence of sesame unambiguous to any customer regardless of where they are shopping from. Using a structured allergen display tool like Allergen Matrix makes maintaining consistent declarations across a large product catalogue significantly more manageable.
The Risk of Cross-Contact With Sesame
Cross-contact — the unintentional transfer of an allergen from one food to another — is a serious concern with sesame specifically because sesame seeds are small, lightweight, and tend to spread easily in production environments. A bakery producing both sesame-topped rolls and plain rolls on the same line faces genuine cross-contact risk, and that risk needs to be communicated to consumers through appropriate precautionary labelling, which in the UK takes the form of a "may contain" statement when the risk is assessed as real and significant.
It is important to distinguish between a meaningful "may contain" warning and one applied indiscriminately as a liability shield. Regulatory guidance in both the UK and US discourages the use of precautionary allergen labelling as a blanket disclaimer when no genuine risk of cross-contact has been assessed. Instead, businesses are expected to conduct a documented allergen risk assessment of their production processes, identify genuine cross-contact risks, implement controls where possible, and then apply precautionary labelling only where residual risk remains after controls are in place.
For online food retailers on Shopify, the practical implication is that your product pages need to reflect the outcome of that assessment accurately. If a product has a genuine sesame cross-contact risk, your product page should state that clearly. If there is no assessed risk, adding a blanket "may contain sesame" to every product is misleading to sesame-allergic customers and undermines the value of allergen information across your store. Accurate, assessed, and clearly displayed allergen information — including cross-contact status — is what builds genuine customer trust and demonstrates compliance with the intent of allergen regulations.
Sesame in Ethnic and Speciality Cuisines
Sesame is particularly prevalent in the product ranges of businesses selling foods associated with Middle Eastern, East Asian, South Asian, and North African culinary traditions. Products such as halva, gomashio, benne wafers, Chinese sesame paste, Korean sesame oil dressings, and a wide range of spice blends used in these cuisines can all contain sesame in various forms. For businesses in these categories, sesame is likely one of the highest-frequency allergens across their product range, and a thorough review of every SKU is essential.
The challenge is compounded by the fact that sesame often appears under names that are not immediately recognisable to consumers — or even to food business operators — as sesame. Til or gingelly (common in South Asian contexts), benne (used in some West African and American Southern traditions), and sim sim (used across parts of East Africa and the Middle East) are all names for sesame. If your suppliers or ingredient specifications use any of these regional terms, you must ensure that your own product labelling and online declarations use the legally recognised term "sesame" so that allergic customers can identify the risk.
For Shopify merchants operating in these speciality food categories, the risk of undeclared sesame is not hypothetical — it is one of the more common real-world allergen compliance failures because the ingredient is so embedded in the flavour profiles and traditional recipes of these cuisines. A structured approach to allergen management, including maintaining up-to-date ingredient specifications from all suppliers and displaying verified allergen information on every product page, is essential. Allergen Matrix is designed specifically to help Shopify food merchants display this information clearly and consistently across their entire store.
Reformulation and Allergen Substitution Considerations
Some food businesses, particularly smaller producers and artisan makers, have explored whether reformulating products to remove sesame is a viable compliance strategy — effectively eliminating the allergen rather than declaring it. In some limited cases this is practical, but it carries its own risks and should not be pursued without careful thought. Reformulation changes the product, potentially affecting taste, texture, and customer expectation, and any reformulated product must itself be fully re-audited to ensure no new allergen risks have been introduced through substitute ingredients.
There is also a specific and well-documented risk associated with sesame reformulation in the US context. Following the FASTER Act coming into force, some manufacturers chose to deliberately incorporate sesame into products that previously may have had only trace levels — sometimes described as a cross-contact risk — in order to declare it as an intentional ingredient. The rationale was that this allowed them to avoid managing cross-contact controls for sesame while still being compliant through declaration. This approach attracted significant criticism from allergen advocacy groups and is not considered best practice; sesame-allergic individuals cannot safely consume products that intentionally contain sesame, regardless of how clearly it is declared.
The better path for most food businesses is accurate declaration of sesame wherever it is genuinely present, combined with proper cross-contact controls and honest precautionary labelling where residual risk exists. Reformulation should be driven by genuine product development goals, not by a desire to sidestep allergen management. Ensuring your Shopify store reflects your current, accurate allergen status — updated whenever a recipe or supplier changes — is the baseline expectation in 2026, and the tools to do this at scale are readily available.
Keeping Sesame Declarations Up to Date as Recipes and Suppliers Change
Allergen declarations are not a one-time exercise. Every time a recipe is modified, a supplier is changed, or a new ingredient is introduced into your production process, your allergen information must be reviewed and updated. Sesame is a particularly common ingredient in flavourings, spice blends, and sauces — compound ingredients that are themselves subject to change by their own manufacturers. A spice blend that was sesame-free in 2023 may have been reformulated since, and without an active supplier review process, that change may go undetected.
Best practice is to establish a scheduled allergen review cycle — at minimum annually, and immediately triggered by any recipe or supplier change. This review should include requesting up-to-date allergen declarations from all ingredient suppliers, cross-referencing those against your current product recipes, and updating your customer-facing allergen information wherever changes are identified. For Shopify merchants with large product catalogues, managing this manually across individual product descriptions is time-consuming and error-prone.
Structured allergen management tools integrated directly into your Shopify store make this process significantly more reliable. When your allergen data is held centrally and displayed through a consistent format on every product page, updating a declaration when a supplier change occurs is a targeted, auditable action rather than a manual hunt through dozens of product listings. Accurate, maintained, and clearly displayed sesame declarations are the standard expected of food businesses in 2026 — both by regulators and by the customers who depend on that information to make safe choices.
Display sesame and all 14 allergens on your Shopify product pages with Allergen Matrix — free to get started at saltai.app.
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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.