Allergen tracking from the pantry item to the order

Allergen management

An allergen declaration is a legal statement, and the most common way it goes wrong in a small bakery is not carelessness. It is that a supplier changed a sprinkle, and nobody had a list of which products just changed with it.

ibakepro tracks allergens from the pantry item outward, and it is built around one rule: never under-declare, and never publish a changed label without a person. Allergen tracking is on every plan.

Three levels, tagged once

An allergen is declared at one of three levels: contains, may contain (cross-contamination risk) and processed in (facility risk). You set the level on the pantry item, and it is the only place you have to set it.

When the same allergen arrives from two directions, the stronger declaration always wins: an ingredient that definitely contains egg and a component that may contain egg read as contains, not may contain. A duplicate can never soften a label, and almonds and Tree Nuts become one entry at the stronger level, never two entries and never the softer one.

It rolls up automatically

Tag peanuts on one ingredient and every component built from it, every product built from those components and every order line for those products inherits the declaration. That aggregation is automatic and happens as things are built.

Scanning a barcode when you add a pantry item can pre-fill its allergens from the scanned product data, matched carefully against your own configured list, so "fish" inside "shellfish" is not a false positive. It fills in the form. You still confirm it, and it is not a substitute for reading the packet.

The catalog is a superset, not a rulebook

When an upstream allergen changes

A recomputed allergen set is a suggestion here, never a publish.

A supplier reformulates. You update the pantry item. ibakepro finds every dependent product, recomputes what its allergen set should now be and flags those products allergen review needed with the suggested set attached.

The published allergens do not move. Not the product-level declaration, not the per-variant copies, not the dietary flags. They stay as they were until a person opens the review and presses apply.

You reach the review from a badge on your products list, which counts what is waiting, or from the product itself, where the same review opens against that one product. Applying it publishes the new set and pushes it out to your storefront and search in the same step.

Overrides, and per-variant precision

You can add an allergen by hand to a component or product the recipe does not know about. Manual additions are add-only: they raise a declaration and never remove one, and they survive every rebuild, so the builder can never quietly strip one. The picker will not offer an allergen already covered at an equal or stronger level.

Variants declare for themselves. A variant carrying its own allergen fields has answered, including when the answer is genuinely none. A variant carrying no declaration falls back to the whole product's union, because an empty variant must never read as allergen-free.

Where it shows up

On the storefront, a product page shows the levels for the variant the shopper selected, resolved to friendly names.

On the order document your customer receives, contains, may contain and processed in each print as their own labelled row, along with any allergy note on the order. There is no setting anywhere that turns that block off. Every other section of that document can be switched off; the allergen block cannot.

Design decisions

• Label templates cover shipping, care and production. The allergen declaration prints on the order document, on every order.
• Traceability shows every product an ingredient ends up in, by resolving the bill of materials. Batch and lot numbers are free text you record against records.
• It does not publish a changed label for you. A flagged product sits flagged until someone applies it. That is the design, and it means an unread review queue is a real operational risk you have to work.
• It is only as good as what you tagged. An untagged pantry item contributes no allergens, and a product will save with none declared without complaint. The component editor does say out loud when nothing came from its pantry items, so an unchecked component and a genuinely allergen-free one do not look the same. The product forms do not say it. Check them yourself.
• Do not use a search filter as a safety check. Filtering your product list by allergen is a convenience for finding things. The product's own declaration, and the order document, are what you rely on.
• Dietary flags are not allergens. Vegan and gluten-free are labels you set; they are stored and displayed separately and nothing derives one from the other.