Start With the Job the Label Has to Do

Allergen information is the one part of a café, deli or bakery label that has to work every single time. A customer might be reading it in a hurry, in dim light, with a queue behind them, and they may be reading it because getting it wrong would make them ill. That changes the design brief. The details still have to look like they belong on your packaging, but legibility comes first and styling comes second.

In the UK, foods prepacked for direct sale — the sandwich you wrap yourself, the sausage roll you bag at the counter — must carry a full ingredients list with the 14 regulated allergens emphasised. Get the typography right and you satisfy the rules while keeping the label calm and readable. Get it wrong and you end up with a cramped block of tiny capitals that customers squint at and staff dread checking.

Pick a Typeface That Survives at Small Sizes

Small print is a test of a typeface, not a test of your patience. A few practical rules will keep you out of trouble.

• Choose a humanist sans-serif with a large x-height. Fonts such as those in the open-source and system families with generous, open letterforms hold up far better at 7–9pt than a high-contrast serif or a fashion-led display face.
• Check your confusable characters. Print a sample and confirm you can tell 1 from l from I, and 0 from O. If you can't, your customer can't either.
• Avoid hairline weights, scripts and heavy condensation. Fine strokes disappear on uncoated kraft and fill in on thermal printer labels.
• Treat 7pt as your working floor and 6pt as an emergency. If the list won't fit at 7pt, your label is too small — make the label bigger or move to a two-panel design rather than shrinking the type.

Use Emphasis Deliberately, Not Everywhere

Regulated allergens must be emphasised within the ingredients list, and the recognised methods are bold, italics, underline, capitals, a contrasting colour, or a different typeface. Pick one and apply it consistently across every product you sell.

Bold is usually the safest choice because it survives photocopying, thermal printing and matte lamination. Test it, though: some fonts have a bold weight that barely differs from the regular, which leaves you technically compliant but practically useless. In that case, switch to a genuinely heavier weight or a complementary font rather than stacking methods. Bold plus italics plus capitals plus underline reads as shouting, slows the eye down and makes the list harder to scan, not easier.

On a deli counter ticket where there's no full ingredients list, a simple Contains: milk, wheat, egg line does more work than any amount of styling. Keep the wording plain, and keep the allergens in the same order every time.

Get Contrast and Finish Right on Real Packaging

Contrast is where elegant design quietly fails. Aim for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for small text, which in practice means dark ink on a light background rather than pale grey on kraft brown or white on a pastel.

• Beware pale inks on recycled stock. The flecked surface eats contrast, and uncoated paper spreads ink, so counters in e, a and o can close up. Nudge your type size up by half a point and open the letter spacing slightly.
• Watch glare and gloss. High-gloss lamination reflects overhead lights. A soft-touch matte finish is often easier to read in a café, especially on a curved jar.
• Never rely on colour alone. Around one in twelve men has some form of colour vision deficiency. If you highlight allergens in red, make sure the emphasis also works in greyscale.

Lay It Out So It Can Be Found Quickly

Regulars learn where to look. Put the allergen block in the same position on every label you produce, and give it a clear heading so nobody has to hunt.

Keep it on a flat area of the pack. Type that runs across a fold, around a jar's curve or over a wrap seam becomes unreadable at exactly the point it matters. Set line spacing at roughly 1.2 to 1.4 times the type size; anything tighter and ascenders and descenders start colliding, which slows reading and invites mistakes.

For the ingredients list itself, sentence case is easier to read than a long string of capitals. Save capitals for short headings, where they work well and add useful emphasis. Align columns of figures and percentages with tabular numerals so quantities line up and the list scans cleanly.

Proof It Before You Print, and After

Screen proofs lie. Print your label at 100 per cent on the actual stock, then hold it at arm's length in café lighting — under a counter light, by a window, in the shadow of a display case. Ask someone who doesn't know the product to find the milk and the wheat, and time how long it takes. If they hesitate, the typography needs work.

Check every SKU individually rather than spot-checking one, since a single swapped template can leave a whole batch wrong. Build a review into your process for whenever a supplier changes a recipe, and keep a printed master list behind the counter so handwritten labels follow the same wording, the same order and the same emphasis as your printed ones. Good allergen typography is quiet, consistent and easy to find — which is exactly what good branding should be.