Adjust the sliders below. Your annual time cost, rating risk, and incident exposure update in real time.
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Based on UK National Living Wage (£12.50/hr including estimated employer NI & holiday pay).
Annual time cost
Rating risk exposure (estimate)
£14,040
At a rating of 4, around 5% of your potential revenue could be at risk from reduced visibility on delivery platforms, Google, and review sites.
Estimate based on your 300 covers/week at £18/cover. Actual impact will vary.
Potential incident exposure
Under the Food Information to Consumers Regulations 2014 and the Food Safety Act 1990, a serious allergen incident can lead to prosecution with unlimited fines, forced closure, and civil claims from affected customers. A single incident can cost far more than years of compliance work.
We'll include practical steps to cut this cost.
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That's money and time you're losing every week. HospoPilot handles the allergen side in minutes a day.
See how HospoPilot fixes this — start a free trial →Hourly rate: £12.50/hour — UK National Living Wage with approximate employer NI and holiday pay contributions factored in. You can adjust this assumption above.
Allergen query cost: 8 queries/day × 7 days × 52 weeks = 2,912 queries/year. At 10 minutes each, that's 485 hours, costing £6,067.
Admin cost: 3 hours/week × 52 weeks = 156 hours/year, costing £1,950.
Rating risk: Estimated based on consumer and platform research showing lower-rated restaurants see reduced visibility on Just Eat, Deliveroo, and Google. Percentages (5%) are estimates, not guarantees.
Incident exposure: Not quantified — actual fines and civil costs vary significantly under UK food safety law and depend on the specific case.
Under the UK Food Information Regulations 2014, every food business must be able to tell a customer whether a dish contains any of the 14 major allergens. Since Natasha's Law (October 2021), food pre-packed for direct sale (PPDS) must also carry a full ingredient list with allergens emphasised. Getting this wrong isn't a paperwork slip — it can cause a life-threatening reaction, trigger enforcement action, and end in prosecution. This calculator gives you a rough sense of your exposure based on your menu, your volume of allergen queries, and how you currently manage them.
Celery, cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, tree nuts, peanuts, sesame, soya and sulphur dioxide/sulphites. Every one of these has to be traceable from your suppliers through to the plate. The most common failure isn't missing an allergen entirely — it's an out-of-date recipe, an unrecorded substitution, or a member of staff giving verbal reassurance that doesn't match the actual ingredients.
The calculator weighs three things: the size and complexity of your menu (more dishes and more substitutions mean more places for an error to hide), how many allergen questions your team fields each week (higher volume means higher chance of a mistake under pressure), and whether your allergen information lives in a controlled system or in people's heads. A busy kitchen relying on memory and a laminated sheet from last season scores far worse than one with a per-dish allergen matrix kept current as recipes change.
Natasha’s Law requires food pre-packed for direct sale (PPDS) — items packed on the premises before a customer orders them — to carry a full ingredient list with the 14 allergens emphasised. It came into force in October 2021 after the death of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse from an unlabelled baguette.
You must be able to provide accurate allergen information for every item, and signpost customers to ask. For loose (made-to-order) food it can be given verbally as long as it’s backed by written records staff can check. For PPDS it must be on the label.
The food business operator is legally responsible for the accuracy of allergen information. That’s why a controlled, up-to-date system — rather than staff memory — matters so much: it’s your evidence of due diligence if something goes wrong.
Every time a recipe, ingredient or supplier changes — not on a fixed schedule. A single swapped ingredient (a different mayonnaise, a new bread supplier) can introduce an allergen that your printed sheet no longer reflects.
This calculator is a guide to help you think about allergen risk — it isn't legal advice or a compliance guarantee.