Guide · October 13, 2026

Allergy notes and special requests on a printed ticket

A request is only worth taking if it reaches the person making the item. Here is how to carry notes and allergy information from the guest to the counter.

A note is only useful if it arrives with the order

When a guest asks for no ice, a sauce on the side, or tells you there is something they cannot eat, that sentence has to survive the trip from the guest to the person making the item. In a spoken queue it survives because one person heard it and is standing in front of the thing they are making. Across a venue with several bars and kitchens it has further to travel, and every hand-off is somewhere for it to fall out: written at one place, repeated at another, remembered at a third. A printed ticket closes that gap in the plainest way available. The request is captured when the guest places the order, it is stored with the order, and it comes out on paper at the counter that owes the item, under the guest's name. It is still there on the second reading, so the person handing the item over can check the paper rather than ask the guest to explain themselves again at the counter.

Attach the request to the item, not to the order

A ticket with five lines and the words "no onions" at the bottom is a question, not an instruction. Which of the five? The fix is a layout decision you make once and then never think about again.

• Print an item note directly beneath the line it belongs to, indented, so it reads as part of that item and cannot be attached to the wrong one.
• Keep order-level information at the top where it belongs: the guest's collection name, the counter, and anything that applies to everything on the ticket.
• If one order contains items made at different counters, each counter should see its own items and the notes for those items, and nothing from the work happening elsewhere on site.

Allergies are a different class of information

A preference changes what gets made. An allergy changes who checks it and how carefully, so it should not look like a preference on the paper. Give it its own line, set it apart from the item lines, and print it in a way that cannot be skimmed past when a counter is busy.

• Keep the words the guest used. Repeating their own wording back to them at the counter is a better check than a code or a symbol that each team interprets slightly differently.
• Say what you cannot promise. If shared equipment means you cannot rule out contact between ingredients, the ordering screen should say so plainly before the guest pays, not after.

A printed note does not discharge anybody's duty. Whoever makes the item and whoever hands it over still follow the venue's own allergen procedure, and a guest who needs reassurance still deserves a conversation with a person. What the ticket does is make sure that conversation starts, because the information reached the counter instead of stopping at the point where the order was taken.

Decide what you will accept before you open

An empty box inviting a guest to type anything they like will eventually produce a request a counter cannot fill, and the awkward part of that happens in front of the guest rather than on a screen. The work is in deciding, in advance, which modifications are real options for each item.

• Offer the common changes as choices on the item itself, so they arrive as something the counter already knows how to do, and mark the items that genuinely cannot be changed. A guest told no before paying is a far better outcome than one told no while collecting.

Read the free text back after an event. The requests guests type most often are the menu options you should have offered, and the ones nobody could fill are the items whose description needs changing. That loop is the whole of it: notes arrive on paper at the counter, the counter can act on them, and what guests keep asking for quietly tells you what to build into the menu next time.

See it on your venue's menu

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