How do you tell the caterer about allergies?

Asking your guests is the easy part. The hard part starts afterwards: turning thirty free-text answers into information a kitchen can work with, and making sure it reaches the right chair on the wedding day.

That is usually where it goes wrong, and not through carelessness but because the chain is long: guest writes to you, you write to the caterer, the caterer tells the kitchen, the kitchen tells the service staff, the service staff look for the table. This piece describes every link in that chain. How to collect the information in the first place is under asking guests about allergies.

The commonest cause of trouble is that everything lands in one pot. For the kitchen these are three different jobs of very different weight.

The third row is why this separation should not sound like bureaucracy. With a genuine allergy it is not enough to leave an ingredient out — it is about separate boards, separate pans, and nobody working with the same spoon. That is labour, and the kitchen has to know about it rather than suspect it.

With every report that sounds like an allergy, ask once: is this a diagnosed allergy, and are traces a problem? That is not an interrogation of the guest, it is the piece of information that decides between two ways of preparing the dish. Phrase the follow-up warmly — most people who live with an allergy are used to explaining it and answer precisely.

A fourth group does not belong in that table and belongs on the list anyway: religious dietary rules. They are not a medical question but they also require separate preparation or certified supplies. Settle early whether your caterer can deliver that — not everyone can, and that is not rudeness but a question of what they are set up and certified to do.

The question belongs in the RSVP, not in a round of its own. Ask twice and you get half the answers the second time.

Three fields are enough, and they should be put like this:

1. Is there anything you do not eat? Free field, for preferences and convictions.
2. Is there anything you cannot digest? Free field, for intolerances.
3. Is there an allergy where even traces are a problem? A separate field, deliberately pointed.

Splitting it into three questions does half the work by itself: it forces the categorisation without you having to sort thirty answers afterwards. Let everything go into one field and you get sentences like “onions do not agree with me” and afterwards have no idea whether an onion in the stock is a problem.

Ask as well for the ages of children. It decides portion size and price and is forgotten in almost every survey.

On timing: the question runs with the RSVP, so well before the caterer's deadline. What works in practice is a flow where the list updates itself with every reply — then on the cut-off date you have a table rather than an inbox. How that works is under online RSVP for your wedding; the RSVP feature collects acceptance, meal choice and restriction in one go, and what you can then do with it is described under managing the guest list online.

Do not send a collection of quotations. Send a table with four columns, sorted by category. It looks like this:

Four rules make that table usable:

• One name per row, not “the Barnes family”. The service staff have to find a person, not a group.
• The category written out, not abbreviated. “Allergy, traces relevant” reads differently from an asterisk.
• The table number, as soon as it is fixed. Without it the service staff search while they are serving — which is the moment plates get swapped. If you are still building the seating plan, planning the seating chart helps.
• A revision date in the header. There will be at least two versions, and the kitchen has to know which one applies.

On the labelling itself, start with the question rather than one country's answer: which allergens must you be able to declare to us, and in what form? The answers differ sharply. Some markets define a fixed statutory list a commercial caterer must be able to declare on request — the EU and the UK work with a list of fourteen substances, which is why celery and mustard appear there and not elsewhere. Others regulate labelling on packaged food only and impose no equivalent duty on a caterer at all, which makes the written brief the only thing you can rely on. Ask your caterer which regime they work under rather than assuming. And note the distinction that gets overlooked everywhere: the duty, where it exists, sits with the commercial operator preparing the food. If you or your family cook, there is nobody to carry it.

The table has been sent, the kitchen has read it — and in the evening the wrong plate still lands in front of the wrong person. The reason is almost always the last handover, from plating to service.

Three procedures work, depending on the service style:

• Plated service. Special plates go out first and are delivered by name, not “to the table”. Some operations use a small card on the rim. Ask about it.
• Buffet. Every dish gets a card listing what is in it, and for the allergy cases a separately prepared plate stands ready and is handed over by the service staff — not at the buffet, where serving spoons wander.
• Family style. The hardest case, because everything gets mixed on the table. Here the person affected needs their own plate, and the table needs a short explanation.

The point that carries all of it is a different one: somebody has to know who is affected, and it cannot be you. On the wedding day you are in no position to supervise this. What works is the service lead plus one person from your own circle who knows the names — a witness, the day coordinator, or whoever else is holding the threads, see coordination on the wedding day.

Tell the affected guests themselves too. One sentence is enough: your plate is being prepared separately and brought to you personally; if anything is unclear, please ask the service staff directly. People with allergies check anyway — they do it more calmly when they know it has been prepared for. And it takes the load off you: you do not have to stand at the buffet all evening reciting ingredients.

The list is not a one-off document. It changes until a few days before the wedding, and how that is handled belongs settled in advance.

Three dates structure the process:

1. Your RSVP deadline for guests. It sits well before the caterer's deadline so that a chasing round fits inside.
2. The caterer's deadline. From here on they cost and buy. It is in your contract; how long it is and what may still be changed afterwards is a contract matter and follows the law of the country you book in. Rely on the line in the contract, not on a rule of thumb.
3. The last chance to change anything. Ask about this explicitly: by when can an additional allergy still be accommodated? That deadline is often shorter than the one for the headcount, because separate preparation takes preparation.

For point 3 there is a simple safeguard: three or four days before the wedding, send a final version of the table clearly marked as final and ask for a short confirmation. That one email prevents more mistakes than any amount of advance planning, because it runs the whole chain from end to end one more time.

And a word on responsibility, because the question comes up regularly: where a commercial operator prepares the food, the duty to give information about ingredients sits with them, and how exactly that duty is framed is set by the law of the country in question. You as a couple carry a different responsibility, and it is a practical one: you are the only people who know who is affected. Passing that on completely, in time and in a readable form is your job — everything after that is the supplier's. If you are unsure whether your supplier can deliver it, settle that before booking rather than after, see choosing a caterer.