How to shop for food that matches your dietary requirements

Whether you follow a specific diet for health reasons, ethical beliefs, religious requirements, or personal preference - finding food that genuinely fits your needs while shopping can be surprisingly difficult. Labels use confusing terminology, ingredients hide under unfamiliar names, and "free from" claims are not always as straightforward as they appear.

This guide covers the most common dietary requirements shoppers navigate in supermarkets across the UK, Australia, and New Zealand - and what to actually look for on labels to make confident choices.

Why label reading is harder than it should be

Food labelling has improved significantly over the past decade, but there are still genuine challenges for people with dietary requirements:

• Hidden ingredients: Dairy can appear as whey, casein, lactose, or ghee. Gluten sources include malt, spelt, kamut, and some oats. Eggs appear as albumin, globulin, or lecithin. Many people who need to avoid these ingredients miss them entirely because they do not recognise the alternative names.
• May contain warnings: "May contain traces of..." statements are voluntary in most countries, meaning their absence does not guarantee a product is free from cross-contamination.
• Ambiguous certifications: Terms like "suitable for vegetarians" do not necessarily mean vegan. "No added sugar" does not mean sugar-free. "Natural" has no regulated definition in most jurisdictions.
• Small print: Ingredient lists are often printed in small font and in low contrast - particularly difficult for older shoppers or anyone with visual impairment.

Common dietary requirements and what to look for

The allergen challenge - a critical safety note

The 14 major allergens that must be declared on food labels in the UK and EU are: celery, cereals containing gluten (wheat, rye, barley, oats), crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, tree nuts, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, and sulphur dioxide and sulphites above 10mg/kg.

In Australia and New Zealand under FSANZ, the priority allergens are: peanuts, tree nuts, milk, eggs, sesame seeds, fish, shellfish, wheat (gluten), and soy.

How to read an ingredient list for your specific diet

Ingredient lists are written in order of quantity - from the largest ingredient by weight to the smallest. This means the first few ingredients make up the bulk of the product, and ingredients listed last are present in very small amounts.

Here is a practical approach to reading labels for any dietary requirement:

1. Scan the allergen declaration first - most products now bold or highlight the allergens within the ingredient list, making it faster to check.
2. Read the full ingredient list - do not stop at the allergen declaration. Some ingredients that conflict with your diet may not be covered by the mandatory declaration.
3. Check for alternative names - use a reference list of hidden names for ingredients you need to avoid, particularly for dairy, gluten, and sugar.
4. Check the "may contain" statement - if you have a severe allergy, cross-contamination warnings are important even if the ingredient itself is not listed.

How certification marks help

Certification marks from recognised bodies take some of the effort out of label reading - the organisation has already verified that the product meets specific standards. Reliable marks to look for include:

• Vegan Society trademark - one of the most widely recognised vegan certifications globally
• Coeliac UK Crossed Grain symbol - guarantees the product contains less than 20 parts per million of gluten
• HMC (Halal Monitoring Committee) - the strictest halal standard in the UK, requires hand slaughter
• HFA (Halal Food Authority) - widely recognised in UK supermarkets
• Kosher certification symbols - look for a kosher hechsher (certification mark) from a recognised certifying body
• Organic certification - Soil Association (UK), ACO (Australia), or BioGro (NZ) certified organic products cannot contain GMO ingredients

Using technology to make dietary shopping easier

Manually checking every ingredient on every product during a weekly shop is genuinely time-consuming - particularly for shoppers with multiple dietary requirements, or for parents checking products are safe for children with allergies.

SustiScan was built specifically to address this. Scan any product barcode and SustiScan instantly checks the ingredient list against your set dietary preferences - flagging any ingredients that conflict with your diet and explaining exactly why.

For a family where one person is dairy-free, another follows a halal diet, and another avoids artificial colours, SustiScan can check all of these simultaneously in a single scan - something that would otherwise require manually reading and cross-referencing multiple ingredient lists.

When labels are not enough

For products without barcodes - fresh deli items, bakery products, loose goods - SustiScan's label scan feature allows you to photograph the ingredient list directly and receive an instant analysis. This covers the gap that barcode databases cannot.

If a product is not in any database, you can also contribute it to SustiScan's community database - helping other shoppers with the same dietary requirements find the same product more easily in future.