California will become the first state to require certain restaurants to disclose the presence of nine major allergens in their menu items with specificity. We should expect to see similar efforts across other jurisdictions with varying levels of specificity and dramatically differing disclosure formats.
The California legislation mandating this, Senate Bill 68 (“SB 68”), known as the Allergen Disclosure for Dining Experiences Act (the “ADDE”), was introduced in January 2025 and signed into law on October 13, 2025.
Effective as of July 1, 2026, covered California restaurants will be required to provide written disclosure of nine major food allergens (i.e., milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame) either:
- On a physical menu (next to or immediately below each item), OR
- On a digital menu (which may include a QR code), so long as there is an alternative for customers who cannot access the digital menu. The alternative may include an allergen chart or grid.
As initially proposed, the ADDE would have required compliance by all California restaurants. However, the final law only applies to restaurants covered by certain federal menu labelling laws, namely, any restaurant or similar retail food establishment located in California that “is part of a chain with 20 or more locations doing business under the same name (regardless of the type of ownership of the locations) and offering for sale substantially the same menu items”, regardless of where the other 20 locations are located.
The ADDE states that enforcement will be left to local enforcement agencies, who will perform “visual verification” or “other reasonable methods of verification” that the establishment’s menus comply with the new requirements. Although compliance strategies will ultimately need to be tailored to satisfy verification methods, restaurants should bear in mind that the ADDE will require “a new level of coordination between culinary, procurement, marketing, and operations teams…, since vendor specifications and product reformulations now have downstream disclosure implications”, according to Dylan McDonnell, the CEO of Foodini, which offers AI-powered solutions to growing allergen disclosure needs. McDonnell anticipates that the ADDE will “push restaurants to operate with the same rigor around ingredient data they already apply to food safety.”
If you think your establishment will be covered by the ADDE, or if you have any compliance questions, please contact Andrew Peskoe or Megan Rockwell or the Golenbock attorney with whom you regularly work. In all events, we should anticipate that these requirements will become common across many jurisdictions in the near future.
Andrew C. Peskoe: 212.907.7377
Email: apeskoe@golenbock.com
Megan E. Rockwell: 212.907.7321
Email: mrockwell@golenbock.com
Zachary Palomino: 212.907.7323
Email: zpalomino@golenbock.com
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