Illustration by Allison & Cam
Twenty years ago, Sarah Jessica Parker unintentionally made life more difficult for allergy sufferers. In an episode of Sex and the City, her protagonist pretends to be allergic to parsley to ensure there is none in her dinner. I was a cook at the time and remember that being regularly cited as evidence that we could not trust customers’ allergy claims.
Despite that, when a take-out order came in tagged with an allergy warning, we marked the receipt with a Sharpie, sanitized our tools and cutting boards and wrote on the packaging so the customer could see that their allergy had been communicated to the kitchen. When I worked in high-end dining, an individual server would be dedicated to an allergic diner, so the customer felt a sense of continuity of communication. This is still what is expected in restaurants.
Despite these established processes, the debate remains: Who is ultimately responsible for ensuring that food allergy requests are handled with the appropriate care? Skepticism of diners has gone up and down over the years (various restrictive fad diets didn’t help). But genuine allergies are nowadays so common that today’s kitchen leaders should have no tolerance for cooks who are intolerant of allergy requests.
Globally, food allergies are on the rise. Today, it’s estimated that 7.5 per cent of Canadians are affected by food allergies whose effects range from inconvenient to fatal. Other than themselves, who can they depend on to protect them from allergens?
In Canada, public-health agencies are not the allergy police. They are tasked with ensuring the safety of food service businesses. They conduct surprise inspections. They investigate reports of food-borne illness or infestation. But they don’t enforce allergy protocols.
Fortunately, it’s become mostly standard for servers at full-service restaurants to start by asking diners if they have any food allergies. But in quick-service restaurants (or QSR in industry lingo), where success is measured in how few minutes it takes to serve each customer, I have never been asked about food allergies. It’s easy to see why. At a drive-through or counter queue, with 20 people ahead, a customer needs to know they’ll get to the front in a matter of minutes, or they won’t come back. Slowing down the process is anathema to the business model.
“Speed and efficiency,” says Cory Vitiello. “In a QSR setting, the whole line and service is built that way.” Vitiello, former chef/owner of the Harbord Room and THR & Co., is the co-owner of Flock, a QSR chain in Toronto.
A good business model should account for lawsuits, though. A mistake with allergies could land a restaurant in court. Last June, 25-year-old Gabrielle Lien Ho used the Tim Hortons app to order a tea for pick-up at a Winnipeg franchise. Allergic to milk protein, Ho ordered her drink with almond milk, but was served cream instead, resulting in a trip to the hospital where it took eight minutes to restart her heart. Ho is suing Tim Hortons and its parent company, Restaurant Brands International. According to her lawsuit’s statement of claim, she is now partially paralyzed, with blurred vision and a host of other conditions that she alleges stem from a lack of oxygen to the brain during those eight minutes.
The lawsuit claims that the restaurant’s app didn’t make sufficient effort to solicit allergy information that would have protected the plaintiff.
The judge must decide on whose side the responsibility lies.
“Servers are encouraged to ask their customers if they have any allergies,” a spokesperson for Manitoba Public Health tells me. “It is up to the consumer to declare their allergen to the server at the time of ordering.”
In Toronto (where restaurant inspection is governed by municipal public health, instead of the province), Public Health inspectors recommend that food service operators consider a host of allergen measures, from staff training to transparency in information. And the Ministry of Health’s Provincial Food Handler Training Manual (at least one employee on the premise must have completed this training) contains seven pages on allergens. The recommendations are quite thorough, but are not mandatory.
Some quick-service restaurants have found ways to show consideration of their clientele’s potential food restrictions.
The Flock menu, designed for health-conscious diners, uses icons to identify dishes that are dairy-free or contain nuts. Staff, says Vitiello, always ask about allergies. Those orders are marked with who made the dish, so someone is accountable, and the nature of the allergy, so the customer has faith that their requests were heard and understood. “They shouldn’t have to go through and look for the mayonnaise or onions,” says Vitiello. “The most valuable thing is trust. That’s why they’ll come back.”
The challenge, in recent years, has been the maintenance of that trust in the absence of human interactions.
Jennifer Gerdts is the executive director of Food Allergy Canada. Gerdts points to how the pandemic kicked off a newfound dependency on digital ordering. And with that shift came a loss of visual and verbal recognition, the human ability to nod or mumble “uh-huh” as an acknowledgment that something like “egg allergy” has been heard. On some websites, there is no way to communicate allergies; on others, there may be a space for “special requests” but there’s no way of knowing whether the request was registered by the kitchen.
“When we can speak face to face, we can better manage the risk,” says Gerdts. While technology has created this problem, Gerdts suggests that digital ordering also presents an opportunity for additional safety protocols. If software requires us to enter our postal code, or to choose a dipping sauce, before allowing an order to be completed, then asking about allergies can be systematized in the same way. Gerdts advocates for having this kind of process in place, as well as more clear communication with diners.
Gillian Aiken, a marketing director allergic to cashew and pistachio nuts, has a son with allergies to shellfish, peanuts and tree nuts (he has outgrown allergies to eggs, peas, lentils, mustard and kiwi). Returning from a trip to Italy, she enthusiastically sends me pics of menus adorned with easy-to-identify allergy icons. The clear labelling of common allergens such as shrimp, nuts and soy made eating out a breeze. Since 2014, this labelling has been required in European Union countries.
In Canada, eating out with allergies is harder.
Aiken’s husband is a chef by training. Dining out was a cherished part of their lives before parenthood.
“It was not something we were going to give up when we had kids,” says Aiken. “Then my son had all these allergies. We really tried not to let it stop us.”
The family is loyal to a nearby sushi spot that always places notes in their take-out, demonstrating that precautions have been taken. The gold standard for Aiken in testing out a new restaurant is seeing they have trained their staff to take allergies seriously, demonstrated by bringing the information full circle back to the diner.
“That they’ll check with the kitchen about what’s in the food and communicate it back to me so I can decide if this feels safe – that’s what would give us confidence.”
Everyone deserves to feel safe eating out. Asking diners about allergies seems the first and most obvious step to fostering that feeling. But there may be another reason that most QSRs don’t ask about allergies, one darker than efficiency – liability.
“Where a provider explicitly asks, I think they are then obligated to act as instructed/requested,” says Lyndsay Jardine, a partner at Wagners, a personal injury law firm in Halifax. “If they fail to do so and that failure causes harm, then I think they are liable for that harm.” Though Jardine stresses that there is an obligation on the individual with the allergy to make it known to service staff. Lawyer Barbara Webster-Evans, in Vancouver, concurs. “The onus would always be on the customer to make the restaurant aware of the risk.”
Aiken agrees that her expectations for restaurants fall short of her family’s needs. “I believe it’s a shared responsibility between the restaurant and the patron. I have no illusion that they bear all the burden of this.”