Why families with food allergies don’t eat out

I am the parent of a young child with severe food allergies. Like a lot of families in the same position, we mostly stopped eating out. Not because of one bad experience in a restaurant: there was no dramatic incident, complaint or confrontation. We stopped because of something more subtle - every restaurant handles and flags allergies differently, and the work of navigating that is exhausting and stressful. To the point where cooking and eating at home is less inconvenient than eating out.

Consider how menus actually communicate allergens. Many say nothing at all. Those that do often frame it in the language of a disclaimer - words chosen to protect the restaurant rather than inform or reassure the customer. The remaining menus largely fall into two categories. Some carry the standard statement asking customers to make staff aware of any allergies - which people should be doing in any event, but which lands on families like ours as that familiar sinking feeling: here we go again with this unsettling and uncertain conversation. Other menus use a lettering or coding system that names allergens for each dish, but in a different way from the restaurant next door, and the one after that. So each menu presents us with the challenge of decoding and interpreting yet another ad hoc way of identifying allergens.

None of this is conducive to an enjoyable meal, or to any reduction in the stress that comes with eating out when severe food allergies are an issue. So it’s easier to simply not eat out. I don’t think restaurants realise this.

I mean that literally and without blame. A restaurant’s evidence about its allergic customers is made up entirely of the customers it has. It doesn’t include the families who read the menu online, find nothing that reassures them enough about allergy management in this restaurant, and simply go elsewhere or stay at home. They don’t complain and they don’t have incidents in the restaurant... because they are not there. An owner can truly say that their restaurant doesn’t have problems with allergy management, while families with allergies - who would love to pay to eat out - are a couple of streets away cooking at home, yet again. Both things can be true at once, because an empty complaint box can be explained as much by a lack of allergy incidents as by a lack of allergic customers. Every restaurant’s base of customers with food allergies is smaller than it could be, and smaller than it ought to be.

This is not about a failure of care. Many kitchens genuinely try with allergy management, and the effort shows in the training, in the folder behind the till, in the serving staff who check with the kitchen. But it is a failure of visibility and communication of trust: that care looks different in just about every restaurant, and it is invisible to the families who are choosing - cautiously, in advance - where they can safely eat. The care is real, but the customers it would win over never find out about it.

That gap is why I built Mint - so that a venue’s allergen information reaches the customer in a consistent, readable form, filtered to their allergies, before they order (and yes they should still inform the restaurant staff about their allergies). We need a tool that makes eating out streamlined, more inclusive and less stressful for us. I certainly never came across that tool, so I built it. But whatever tool a restaurant uses, the point stands on its own: the families you would most impress are the ones you’ve never met. The first restaurant on the street to speak to them clearly, in writing, will be the first one to find out how many of them there are.