Diet & Allergy Passport
How ELLA handles allergies
ELLA can tell you that a dish conflicts with your profile, that it may conflict, or that it cannot be verified. It never decides how serious your allergy is. That is a fact only you hold.
You set the severity, not ELLA
Every allergy on your profile carries a severity you set yourself. It can be marked severe, or left as an ordinary allergy. ELLA does not grade it for you, and it does not need an answer before it will warn you — an allergy nobody has graded still warns.
What the severity changes is how hard the warning insists:
- An ordinary allergy
- A warning you can dismiss. Tapping outside it or pressing back closes it.
- A severe allergy
- A warning you have to answer. No dismissing it by tapping outside, no back button.
The control sits on both screens that can change an allergy: the one-off setup when you first create a profile, and the profile editor you use afterwards.
What the warning actually says
ELLA separates a conflict it is confident about from one it is only guessing at, and it separates both from having no information at all. The wording changes with what it found:
This dish conflicts with your allergy profile: peanuts.
When the menu names an allergen on your profile
This dish may contain peanuts. The menu does not say for certain.
When the menu hints at it without saying
Either way the question is the same — Do you still want to add it to your cart? — and you can ask for a person instead. Choosing Talk to staff at an ELLA venue gets you: “A member of staff has been asked to come over.” At a venue that is not on ELLA it says so plainly, rather than pretending: “This venue is not on ELLA, so we cannot call staff for you here.”
If your profile itself cannot be read, ELLA does not quietly carry on as though the dish were fine:
We could not load your allergy and diet preferences, so we have not been able to check this dish against them.
Unverified never means safe
Something ELLA read off a photograph of a menu is not something the venue said, and ELLA keeps the two apart all the way to the dish. An item can be verified, partly verified, or unverified — and only a fully verified item is ever described as having no conflict. Everything else says what it is:
Ingredient & allergen information not fully verified by this venue.
An empty allergen list is not read as an all-clear. A list that names peanuts is evidence of peanuts whoever typed it; a list that does not name them is only evidence of their absence if somebody stood behind that list.
The fourteen regulated allergens
A venue confirms a dish against the fourteen allergens that UK and EU law requires a food business to declare. It is a closed list on purpose, so that a guest picking from tiles and a venue declaring on a menu are naming the same fourteen things — that is what stops a guest’s “shellfish” missing a menu’s “crustaceans”.
- Celery
- Cereals containing gluten
- Crustaceans
- Eggs
- Fish
- Lupin
- Milk
- Molluscs
- Mustard
- Nuts
- Peanuts
- Sesame
- Soya
- Sulphur dioxide / sulphites
The fourteen are not the whole story and ELLA does not pretend they are. An allergy that is not one of them is stored as your own entry rather than forced into the nearest tile.
What the venue is told
What a venue is told is a separate record from your profile. When you sit down at a table, a declaration is created for that venue, so staff know before anything is ordered. Changing your mind writes a new record and marks the old one, because what a venue was told at the time is the question anyone asks afterwards.
The kitchen ticket is built from that declaration and never from your profile. Choosing not to show your profile to staff is not choosing to be served food made without knowing. Severe entries are printed apart from ordinary ones, you are named on the ticket, and a record ELLA could not fully read says so — because “no allergies” and “we could not read them” look identical on a blank ticket and are not the same thing to whoever is cooking.
On the manager’s board, a table turns red as soon as a guest with a severe allergy sits down, and says who and what.
What a venue confirms
Every item a venue has not confirmed is flagged in its own menu editor. Confirming it means a person reading what ELLA extracted, correcting it, and putting their name to it:
ELLA read this from your menu. Check it, add anything missing, then confirm.
A confirmation with nobody’s name against it is not a confirmation, so who confirmed it and when are both recorded. Confirming that a dish has none of the fourteen is a positive statement, and the venue is told so before it does it: “ELLA found none. Confirming says this dish is free from all fourteen.” The menu header carries the running figure — Menu verified: N%.
What ELLA does not do
- It does not tell you a dish is safe. It tells you what it found, and what it could not find out.
- It does not decide how serious your allergy is. You grade it, and the grade decides how hard the warning insists.
- It does not refuse an order on your behalf. A warning you have graded ordinary can be dismissed, and the dish added.
- It does not treat an empty allergen list as an all-clear.
If you have a severe allergy, the person to talk to is the venue. ELLA is built to make sure they have been told, and to make sure you are told when nobody has checked.