Blog :Pret's Five Point Allergy Plan
Blog by Clive Schlee, CEO of Pret
3rd May 2019
I went onto ITV News this week (always quite an intimidating experience) to explain Pret’s Five-Point Allergy Plan and show how we are labelling our food. The allergy issue has struck a deep chord at Pret for well publicised reasons and we can now announce a simple five-point plan to show what we are doing. Here are the five points:
Full ingredient labels in every UK shop on all freshly made products. Following recent pilots, full ingredient labels are live in 20 Pret shops this week – the first step in a nationwide rollout.
Touch-screen tablets with full ingredient information in every UK shop. Customers will be able to proactively search through Pret’s menu, filtering out ingredients to find products that are right for them.
Removing allergens from products without compromising taste. Over 70 Pret recipes have been reformulated to remove one or more allergens, without impacting quality or taste.
Pret to share quarterly incident updates. To help boost transparency across the food industry, Pret will produce detailed updates on food safety and ingredients on a quarterly basis.
An inside-out approach to allergy awareness. We will build on our existing allergy training programme to encourage the right behaviours and understanding of allergies in every shop. This will include adding allergy awareness to Pret’s weekly “mystery shopper” programme; and additional training for 1,000 Baristas, Hot Chefs and other key roles.
Sticking labels onto products sounds easy but doing it accurately every time is not. I’m very grateful for the hard work of our teams who have been designing and testing the most effective processes on over 600,000 salads and sandwiches in our pilot shops. We would be happy to share our learnings with other companies (including our big competitors!) so that they can get off to a good start when the time comes.
The plan will absorb a lot of Pret energy and we’ll continue to share changes over the coming months. Please do get in touch if you would like to suggest other steps we should take.