Free guide
The letter comes home in the first week. No nuts. And the problem is never the jar of peanut butter, because you already knew about that one. It is the cereal bar, the pesto, the chocolate spread, the cookie that has always been fine.
This is about where nuts turn up in a lunchbox, not about how to treat a reaction. If your child's allergy is severe, their doctor and their school plan come first, and nothing here replaces either. If it is another child's allergy you are packing around, the school's rule is the rule.
Chocolate spread. Hazelnut, almost always, and it is the one most often packed by someone who has not thought about it.
Granola and cereal bars. Frequently almond or hazelnut, and very often made on a line that handles nuts even when they are not an ingredient.
Pesto. Pine nut in the classic, cashew in the cheap ones.
Anything described as a healthy snack. Energy balls, granola, seed mixes. Nuts are the default binder and the default protein.
Sauces, mostly. Satay is obvious. Less obvious are korma, some tagines, and the dressing on a store bought salad.
Baked goods carry it two ways: as an ingredient, and as the marzipan or praline inside. A sponge cake can be nut free and sit next to something that is not.
Some breads use nut flour. Some chips are fried in nut oil.
And a lot of packages that contain no nuts at all were made in a factory that does. The label will say so, and that line is not decoration.
At an iftar table there is no label at all, and the nut is in the garnish or the box from the sweet shop.
Look past the ingredients list to the line underneath it. May contain nuts. Made in a factory that also handles nuts. Not suitable for nut allergy sufferers.
Whether that line rules a food out is a decision for you and your doctor, not for a website. What matters is that you have read it rather than stopped at the ingredients.
The words to scan for are the ones that are not the word nut: almond, hazelnut, cashew, pistachio, pecan, walnut, macadamia, brazil, praline, marzipan, nougat, frangipane, satay, arachis.
Nothing here needs a nut, and none of it depends on a special product.
Seeds do the job nuts were doing, where the school allows them. Sunflower and pumpkin go in the same places, and sesame is worth checking first because some schools treat it the same way. Sesame is easier to spot than it used to be: since January 2023 it has to be declared on the label like milk and peanut are.
If eggs are out too, what the egg was doing decides the swap, and a boiled egg in a box has no swap at all.
Cross contamination in a lunchbox is usually made in your kitchen, not theirs. The knife that went in the chocolate spread for one child, then the cheese for the other. The board that had the granola on it.
One knife, one board, and make the nut free lunch first. It is a smaller change than reading every label twice, and it removes the failure that catches the parents who read everything correctly.
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