Two separate regulatory regimes govern what you put on your menu and what you keep behind the counter — confusing them can leave you non-compliant under both.
By Dylan McDonnell, Founder & CEO, Foodini | June 2025
It can be easy to put nutrition and allergen disclosures in the same bucket. What is not always obvious is that these are entirely separate legal obligations, governed by different statutes, triggered by different thresholds, and requiring different modes of disclosure. Getting them mixed up by treating full nutrition data as something that belongs on the menu, or treating allergen information as optional context — is a fast route to regulatory exposure.
The FDA's menu labelling rule, codified under Section 4205 of the Affordable Care Act and enforced since 2018, requires covered establishments to display calorie information on the menu itself.
A "covered establishment" is a restaurant or similar retail food establishment that is part of a chain of 20 or more locations, doing business under the same name, and offering for sale substantially the same menu items. If you operate 20 or more locations, calorie counts must appear clearly and conspicuously on menus and menu boards, including digital menu boards, in a manner that enables guests to see them when making ordering decisions.
The calorie figure displayed must reflect the total calorie content of the standard menu item as served. The rule does not require displaying all nutritional values on the face of the menu — calories only. But that is where the obligation stops, not where it ends.
Here is where operators routinely misread the regulation. The FDA rule requires covered establishments to make written nutritional information available upon request for every standard menu item. This is not about calories — it is about the complete nutritional profile, covering ten mandatory factors:
This information must be accurate, reflect the item as served, and be made available in written form when a guest requests it. It does not need to appear on the printed menu or menu board. But it must exist, it must be current, and it must be accessible to staff who can produce it immediately upon request.
A guest with hypertension scanning for sodium content, or a diabetic managing carbohydrate intake, has the legal right to that information at your counter. If your front-of-house team cannot produce it — or produces figures that are out of date because a supplier reformulated an ingredient last quarter — you are non-compliant.
This distinction matters operationally: calorie labelling is a display obligation; full nutrition disclosure is a records and access obligation. Both are enforceable.
Allergen disclosure in foodservice operates under a different statutory framework to packaged food labelling. The FASTER Act of 2021 added sesame as the ninth major allergen — alongside milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, and soybeans — and applies to packaged food manufacturers. For restaurants, allergen disclosure obligations are primarily driven by state law. In California, SB 68 requires restaurants to disclose the presence of the Big 9 allergens in menu items, with compliance required from 1 July 2026. This law requires allergen information for menu items to be displayed on all physical and digital menus (including 1st and 3rd party online ordering).