Rethinking precautionary allergen labelling – Threshold doses, risk assessment approaches and analytical implications

Food allergies became a major public health and food safety interest in the past decades as their prevalence is increasing, and their only available treatment is a strict elimination diet that necessitates appropriate food labelling regulations. While such regulations are available worldwide, most of them are not taking into account inadvertent allergen cross-contamination and they usually do not define threshold doses that could support the industry in their endeavour to provide reliable food labels for allergic consumers. This resulted in the proliferation of the “may contain” type precautionary allergen labelling (PAL), which is voluntary and is intended to warn consumers for potential unintended contamination with an otherwise undeclared allergen. As this kind of labelling is hardly ever based on actual risk assessment, it puts both the industry and the consumer into a difficult position. A promising tool towards the solution of this problem could be allergen threshold doses based on clinical data, which are becoming increasingly available. This review intends to present this process, the new ways of improved risk assessment it opens, and its implications for food analysis.