The Rule

Celery is one of the 14 allergens requiring mandatory declaration in the EU and UK. Unlike allergens where practical thresholds operate in risk assessment, celery must be declared at any level — and the obligation applies to celery in any form, including seed, stalk, extracts and oleoresins.

There is no quantity small enough to be exempt. That is the whole difficulty.

Why It Keeps Causing Recalls

Undeclared celery appears regularly in European food-safety notifications, and the cause is rarely deliberate use. The recurring routes are:

  1. Hidden in a compound ingredient. Celery sits inside stock bases, bouillon, savoury concentrates and seasoning blends. A manufacturer buying "savoury seasoning" may not have interrogated what is in it;
  2. Carry-over on shared equipment. A line that ran a celery-containing seasoning and then ran a product that should not contain celery. With no threshold, even trace carry-over creates an obligation;
  3. Supplier change without re-checking. A reformulated blend from a new supplier introduces celery where the previous one had none;
  4. Extract assumed exempt. The mistaken belief that an oleoresin or extract escapes the declaration. It does not.

What This Means Practically

Beyond the label

Celery belongs in your allergen matrix and your cleaning validation, not only your label copy. If celery-containing products share a line with celery-free ones, the changeover procedure needs to be validated for it.

Interrogate compound ingredients

Ask every seasoning, base and concentrate supplier whether celery is present in any form. "Natural flavouring" and "vegetable extract" descriptors on a supplier specification are exactly where it hides.

Check the carrier too

Standardised oleoresin grades are often plated or diluted onto a carrier. That carrier can carry its own allergen considerations. Require the carrier named, its inclusion level, and its allergen status — assessing the active alone is incomplete.

Inform downstream

Your customers' labelling obligation depends on knowing what you supplied. Documentation should travel with the material rather than sitting in a file awaiting a request.

Why Buyers Still Use It

Because celery is genuinely difficult to replace. Its savoury character comes from phthalides — principally sedanolide and 3-n-butylphthalide — a compound class largely specific to celery and its close relatives. Stock bases, bouillon and savoury seasoning built around celery do not taste the same without it, and there is no clean substitute.

So the sensible position is not avoidance but disciplined handling: use it deliberately, document it fully, and control carry-over.

What to Require From a Supplier

  1. Full allergen documentation as standard, shipping with each batch rather than on request;
  2. Carrier named, with inclusion level and its own allergen status;
  3. Part declaration — though note the allergen status applies to seed and stalk alike;
  4. Phthalide profile by GC and volatile oil, as the technical specification;
  5. Clear labelling of shipping containers so the material is identifiable in your store.

A Note on Proportion

None of this makes celery a dangerous ingredient to work with. It is a long-established food used at scale across savoury manufacturing, and allergic individuals are a small minority. The point is narrower: the obligation is absolute rather than proportionate, so the usual instinct to scale controls to quantity does not apply here. Treating a small inclusion as a small problem is precisely the reasoning that produces recalls.

SV Botanica supplies celery seed oleoresin with full allergen documentation as standard. Request specification and documentation.