Allergen matrix

This sizes an allergen matrix and the work of keeping it current. Enter the dishes and drinks on the menu, the declared allergens per dish on average, the menu changes per month, the front-of-house staff to brief and the briefing minutes per person per change, and the page returns the cells in the matrix against the 14 allergens that must be declared, the declarations to make, the updates per month, the briefing minutes per month and the rows re-issued per year. The allergen list is the Food Standards Agency's, cited below; the counts are yours.

Fourteen columns, because fourteen is the list

In Great Britain only the 14 allergens are required to be declared as allergens by food law: celery, cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, sulphur dioxide and sulphites, and tree nuts. The matrix is the menu down the side and those fourteen across the top, and the page counts the cells so the size of the job is visible before the first dish is checked. A US kitchen keeps the same matrix against its own declared list.

Every menu change is a matrix change and a briefing

A new special, a swapped supplier or a changed recipe changes a row, and a row changed without the team being told is a matrix that lies to a customer. The page multiplies the changes by the staff and the briefing minutes so the cost of a specials board that changes daily is a figure, and so the briefing is planned rather than hoped for.

Sulphites have a threshold; everything else does not

Sulphur dioxide and sulphites are declared where they are at a concentration of more than ten parts per million; the other thirteen are declared when present. The page treats every declaration as a row to keep, because the record of why a cell is empty matters as much as the cell that is filled when a customer asks.