Collecting dietary requirements from your wedding guests

Below: why tick lists reliably miss the cases nobody thought of, the wording that works instead, the two deadlines involved, and the three handovers between the reply form and the plate where information usually gets lost. There is also a short section on what you should deliberately not ask, which is more than most couples expect.

These three arrive in the same box on the same form and behave completely differently once they reach a kitchen.

An allergy is a safety issue. The kitchen has to think about cross-contamination — shared fryers, bread baskets, sauces, garnishes, the dessert nobody thought about — and in a severe case that changes how a dish is plated and carried, not just what is in it.

An intolerance is a comfort issue with a medical basis. It needs an accurate substitution but not the same containment.

A preference — vegetarian, vegan, no red meat, no shellfish — is a hospitality issue. Get it wrong and somebody eats less; nobody is harmed.

It helps to speak the caterer's language. Food businesses in the UK and the EU work to a defined list of fourteen named allergens — among them peanuts, tree nuts, milk, eggs, fish, crustaceans, molluscs, soya, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, sulphites and cereals containing gluten — and are expected to be able to say which of them a dish contains. Naming your guest's allergen in those terms gets a precise answer instead of a reassuring one.

Say this distinction out loud in the question itself. Ask for allergies and intolerances in one place, and what people simply do not eat in another. Without that split the caterer either treats everything as critical, which is expensive and slows service, or treats nothing as critical, which is the outcome you cannot afford.

As a planning assumption, expect a meaningful minority of your guest list to declare something, weighted heavily towards dietary choices rather than genuine allergies. Cater the vegetarian option as a full main course in proper quantity, and let anyone order it — that alone absorbs a surprising share of the problem.

The obvious solution is a tick list: vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, dairy free, nut allergy. It is easy to count and it systematically misses things, because people only declare what is printed. A guest with a shellfish allergy finds no box and ticks nothing at all.

An open field takes marginally longer to process and catches the cases you did not anticipate. In practice a combination works best.

Three or four boxes for the common cases, then one open question along the lines of anything else the kitchen should know, is the version that fails least often.

One detail that catches almost everyone: ask per person, not per invitation. Where two guests reply under one name and there is only one field, the second person's requirement disappears without trace. If you are collecting replies through your wedding website, make the field repeat for each named guest rather than sitting once at the bottom.

The first deadline is the RSVP itself. Somebody already filling in a reply will fill in one more field; a separate round of questions later means a second round of chasing.

The second is your caterer's. Kitchens generally want the final breakdown seven to fourteen days ahead, because that is when ordering and prep happen. Set your own cut-off before that and hand over one consolidated list rather than a trickle of amendments. Amendments are where things go wrong: the third one reaches the chef but not the front-of-house sheet.

1. With the RSVP — the question sits in the reply form
2. With each reminder — chase blank fields specifically, not just missing yeses
3. Around three weeks out — your own cut-off; consolidate and tidy the wording
4. Around two weeks out — one complete list to the caterer
5. Final days — safety-critical changes only

Leave that last door open. A newly diagnosed allergy or a pregnancy that becomes relevant late is worth a phone call three days beforehand — but a call to the named person in the kitchen, not an email into a general inbox.

Ask the caterer at the same time how they want the list formatted. Most have a preference, and matching it saves a round of clarifications in the busiest week.

Order one or two spare covers of the main alternative while you are at it. A guest who declared nothing changes their mind at the table, a child eats the vegetarian option, or somebody swaps seats — and a kitchen with no spare plate has to send out something improvised. Two extra covers cost a fraction of one place setting and remove the most common last-minute scramble of the whole meal.

There are three handovers between a guest typing an answer and that guest getting the right plate, and each one loses information.

Reply to master list. Keep name, table and requirement in one place. Requirements scattered across emails and screenshots are the reason couples end up rebuilding the list from memory the week before.

Master list to kitchen. The caterer needs counts and locations, not your raw notes: how many of each variant, and on which tables. Sorting it that way takes twenty minutes and removes an entire category of mistake.

Kitchen to seat. This is where most failures actually happen. Use a discreet marker on the place card — a small symbol, a coloured dot, a different card stock — so the service team can see at a glance who gets the alternative. Brief the head of service before the first plates leave, and agree what happens if a guest has moved seats.

Ask one more question while you are at it: how the caterer handles cross-contamination when there is a genuine allergy on the list. A kitchen that answers concretely — separate boards, separate oil, plated first, carried separately — has done it before. A vague answer is worth following up.

Service style changes the risk more than the menu does. A plated main course can be built and carried separately; a buffet or sharing platters hand control to the guests, and cross-contact then happens at the table with a serving spoon rather than in the kitchen. If somebody on your list has a severe allergy, ask for their plate to be made up in the kitchen and brought out, even when everybody else is helping themselves.

It is tempting to collect everything. Resist it. What the kitchen needs is cannot eat nuts. It does not need the diagnosis, the medication, or the reason behind a dietary choice, and none of it changes the cooking.

• Collect only what changes the dish or the service. Everything else stays out of the form.
• Never ask for a reason. An open field is enough; nobody should have to justify what they eat.
• Do not display the list. It goes to the kitchen and the service team, not on a noticeboard and not into a group chat.

Afterwards, delete it. Once the wedding is over the list has no further purpose, and keeping health-adjacent information about eighty people in an old spreadsheet indefinitely is neither tidy nor respectful of the people who gave it to you.

One last point about fairness. A guest who declares something should not be made conspicuous by it. If the alternative main arrives at the same time, looks like a proper dish and is plated the same way, nobody feels singled out — and in practice several people without any requirement will quietly wish they had ordered it too.