How to share loose bakery items?

When you’re collecting food, you must ensure allergen information is available. This will usually be labeled on the product itself if it's prepacked, or provided separately at the time of collection by businesses that change their menus regularly (such as caterers). You must not collect food when no allergen information is available. Check out our specific guidance on Allergens.

However, loose bakery items will often be unlabelled and you may collect them provided you follow the below instructions:

Don't:

❌ Never try to identify loose/unlabelled items if there is no name for it on the container or bag. Indeed, if you misidentify an item or if it was in contact with other products, someone could get the wrong allergen information and have an allergic reaction.

Do:

✅ List these items specifically as "Loose bakery items". Listing these items with ANY other listing name will result in a reminder message to correctly list the items.

✅ Ask the store to bag the items for you. If they will not do this, please use either tongs, sanitised hands and/or gloves.

✅ Make sure that the requester is aware that you cannot identify a specific product. They should identify the items themselves using the information available on the allergen page.

Remember that it is perfectly fine to ask the requesters to bring their own containers to collect loose bakery items.

Why can't I use any other listing name such as 'Mixed pastries', 'Mix bakeries', etc?

We ask our Food Waste Heros to strictly use only "Loose bakery items" in order to efficiently identify any incorrectly labeled items within our system. Using any other generic label like "Mixed pastries" or "Mix bakeries" would hinder our ability to leverage automation and necessitate manual judgment, resulting in a time-consuming and unscalable process.