How we work out what you can eat
Short version: we check what a recipe is made of, not what the packet says. That catches most things and misses some. Here is exactly where the line is.
What we actually do
Every one of the 90 ingredients used across our 47 recipes has been gone through by hand and recorded as carrying particular allergens, or as carrying none. When you tell us you cannot eat something, we work out what each recipe contains from those ingredients and keep anything that clashes out of your week entirely.
We do not do this with tags. A recipe is not gluten-free because somebody remembered to label it gluten-free; it is gluten-free because nothing in it carries gluten. That distinction is the whole design, because tags are the sort of thing that get forgotten on the recipe somebody adds in a hurry.
What we cannot do
We have never seen the packet in your hand. That means four things are invisible to us, and all four are real:
- Seven of the fourteen. UK law names fourteen allergens. We track 7 of them (cereals containing gluten, milk, eggs, fish, crustaceans, tree nuts, soya) and offer a filter for each. We do not track celery, lupin, molluscs, mustard, peanuts separately from tree nuts, sesame, sulphites, so there is no filter for those and nothing on this site will warn you about them. Mayonnaise contains mustard; a cheap sausage contains sulphites. If one of those is your allergy, this site cannot help you and you should not read a passing filter as though it did.
- May-contain warnings. A product made in a factory that also handles nuts carries a warning we cannot see. For a severe allergy that warning is the whole point.
- Brands differing from each other. Most own-brand vegetable stock cubes are gluten-free. Some thicken with wheat. We flag the ingredients where this comes up on the recipe itself, rather than guessing.
- Brands changing. A recipe reformulated last month is still the old recipe as far as we know.
So the honest way to use this site is as a shortlist, not as a clearance. We get you to a handful of meals worth looking at. The label does the last step.
Halal, kosher, and why they are different
Halal and Kosher are not questions about what is in a dish. They are questions about how a product was made and certified, which is a property of the thing in the shop and not of the recipe. We keep pork, shellfish, alcohol and meat-with-dairy out of what we show you, and that is genuinely useful, but it is not certification and we will not pretend otherwise.
So we went and looked. Aldi, which is what every plan here is priced at, sells no certified halal or kosher meat. For halal, ASDA carries the HFA-certified Shazans range and Tesco has halal chicken, lamb and beef in a few hundred stores. For kosher there is no supermarket meat at all in the shops we price. Tesco and ASDA both have a kosher range, and it is beans, houmous, matzo and sliced cheese. Kosher meat means a kosher butcher.
What we checked, and what it cost
| Instead of | Product | Shop | Price | Per kg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken breasthalal | Shazans Chicken Breast Fillets450g · HFA Approved, stated on the pack | ASDA | £4.23 | £9.40 |
| Beef mincehalal | Shazans Beef Mince500g · Shazans, HFA range | ASDA | £5.24 | £10.48 |
| Beef mincehalal | Shazans 10% Fat Beef Mince500g · Shazans, HFA range | ASDA | £7.00 | £14.00 |
| Lamb mincehalal | Shazans 12 Lamb Koftas400g · Shazans, HFA range | ASDA | £5.27 | £13.18 |
| Cheesekosher | Chevington Kosher Sliced Mild White Cheddar180g, 9 slices · Kosher, stated on the pack | Tesco | £3.00 | £16.67 |
| Baked beanskosher | Tesco Kosher Baked Beans420g · Kosher, Tesco own label | Tesco | £0.65 | £1.55 |
Checked by hand on 20 September 2026 and they will drift. Halal chicken came out at £9.40 a kilo against the £6.69 we price Aldi's uncertified chicken at, and kosher cheddar at £16.67 against £5.39. We are not a certification authority and none of this is a ruling. The pack in your hand is what counts.
The part worth knowing
Nothing on this list needs a certificate from anybody: tofu, chickpeas, red lentils, kidney beans, eggs. That is not a consolation prize offered to somebody who cannot buy the meat. At Aldi prices they are the cheapest protein in the shop, and they make the whole question go away. Most of what this site is good at is already built out of them.
If getting this wrong makes you ill
7 of the requirements you can pick are medical rather than a preference: coeliac / gluten-free, dairy-free, lactose intolerant, nut-free, egg-free, fish and shellfish free, soya-free. For those, treat everything above as the reason to keep reading labels rather than the reason to stop. We are a way of narrowing 47 recipes down to the few worth your time. We are not a substitute for the packet, and we are not medical advice.
Found something wrong?
If a recipe here is missing an allergen, that is a bug we want to know about more than any other. The ingredient data is checked by hand, and hands make mistakes.