Natasha's Law compliance, baked into every phone call

What Natasha's Law means for phone orders

Natasha's Law— the Food Information (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2019 — came into force in October 2021 after the death of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who suffered a fatal allergic reaction to a baguette that didn't disclose its sesame content. The law makes allergen disclosure a regulatory obligation, not a courtesy. For phone orders the requirement is unambiguous: when a caller asks about allergens, your business must answer correctly, and you must be able to evidence that you did.

The 14 allergens named by the Food Standards Agency are: celery, cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, tree nuts, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, and sulphites. Your menu schema must map every item to a subset of this list. OrderBrain refuses unknown allergen labels at upload time — a typo doesn't silently fall through to an unsafe answer.

The allergen Q&A audit log

Every allergen question a caller asks is captured to OrderBrain's allergen_qna table. The schema is purpose-built for compliance evidence:

• call_sid — the unique Twilio call identifier
• question_text — the exact transcript of what the caller asked
• answer_text — the exact words the AI agent spoke back
• items_referenced — every SKU the question was about
• allergens_asked — every FSA allergen the caller named
• matched — true only when every (item, allergen) pair resolved against your declared schema; false when the agent had to fall back to a kitchen check
• asked_at — timezone-aware UTC timestamp

The dashboard surfaces an “unmatched questions” view filtered to the last N days. Every entry there is a menu item with missing or incomplete allergen data — the audit log doubles as a continuous menu-quality signal.

The fall-back answer — when the agent doesn't know

The single most important behaviour for allergen safety is what the agent does when it's unsure. OrderBrain's fall-back is fixed in code: “I want to be sure — let me check with the kitchen and call you straight back.” The system never guesses. Every UNKNOWN signal — an SKU not on the schema, an allergen not declared on the SKU — triggers the fall-back and logs matched=false. That's the difference between “we've told the caller we'll get back to them” (safe, demonstrable) and “the AI said it was fine” (catastrophic, indefensible).

Two-party consent and call recording

UK call recording for the purpose of food-safety compliance falls under the legitimate-interest basis in UK GDPR. OrderBrain plays the consent phrase “This call may be recorded for order accuracy and quality assurance” before recording starts, by default. The phrase is configurable per tenant for regional language packs; the consent gate itself is not — it's always played.

FAQ

What does Natasha's Law require of UK restaurants?

Natasha's Law — formally the Food Information (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2019 — requires food businesses to disclose the presence of any of the 14 named allergens when asked. For pre-packed-for-direct-sale food it mandates ingredient labelling. For phone orders the requirement is that the caller can ask, and your business can answer correctly and demonstrably.

Which 14 allergens does the Food Standards Agency name?

Celery, cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, tree nuts, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, and sulphites (sulphur dioxide). OrderBrain's allergen schema maps every menu item to this canonical list and refuses to silently rewrite or alias an unknown allergen name.

How does OrderBrain's allergen audit log work?

Every time a caller asks about allergens, OrderBrain records the question text, the items it was about, the answer the AI agent gave, whether the answer was matched against your menu schema or fell back to a kitchen check, and the call SID. The log is searchable, exportable, and retained per your data-retention policy.

What if the AI doesn't know?

It refuses to guess. The fall-back answer is 'I want to be sure — let me check with the kitchen and call you straight back.' That answer is logged with matched=false so your team can spot menu items with missing or incomplete allergen entries.

Can we audit a specific call?

Yes. Every call SID exposes a complete record: recording, transcript, allergen Q&A rows, captured order, sentiment label. One URL, one search, one audit trail.