It’s a common disappointment to wander down a ‘’free from’’ aisle with a nut allergy, expecting some great options, to find only a couple of cereal bars that are safe to eat if you’re lucky. There’s a surprising amount of products that still contain nuts but not other allergens, or items that are free from every allergen and lose what make them tasty in the first place. Next time you’re in one of these aisles, stand for five minutes and count the gluten free products. Then count the ones that are specifically nut free. This gap tells us that aisles that promise to solve allergen shopping don't do so equally and that nut allergies, despite being the most common severe allergy category, are deprioritised.
Why does gluten dominate free from?
The annual UK market for free from is now worth £4.6bn, with sales growing 6.5% year on year [1]. Wheat free/gluten free, cow-dairy free, and nut free are major subcategories, but they are often not equally represented.
Coeliac UK estimates around 1 in 100 people are affected by coeliac disease [2], and patient groups actively promote testing, which has led to clinical diagnoses that have driven decades of retail investment into dedicated gluten-free ranges. ‘'Free from'’ arguably became a retail category off the back of this gluten-free demand. Coeliac disease has a clear clinical diagnosis pathway, a patient advocacy infrastructure that has existed for decades, and a customer base willing to pay a premium for daily staples (bread, pasta, biscuits) that they need to buy every single week.
Unfortunately nut allergies don’t have the same options as they follow a potentially different logic in the eyes of manufacturers and supermarkets. It could be viewed that someone with a nut allergy doesn’t need a nut free version of bread, pasta, or biscuits in the way that a coeliac does since gluten is a core part of those products and nuts aren’t (most of the time). But, those same products are often given a ‘may contain’ label, or they are made in a factory that also processes tree nuts or peanuts. It appears to be seen as a completely different commercial problem, and supermarkets haven’t built their free from aisles around it, despite having the same limiting effect for people with nut allergies.
Is gluten free more commercially attractive than nut free?
So, why is this the case? Supermarkets are increasingly mainstreaming gluten free products, moving staples like bread and pasta from just being in ‘’free from’’ aisles and into regular aisles. This is to reduce the amount of time it takes for someone to find them, meaning more sales and a better experience for consumers. It helps that gluten-free as a category has both people with serious clinical diagnoses, and also a large amount of lifestyle choice buyers who don’t want to consume gluten but don't have a diagnosis preventing them from doing so.
This lifestyle choice aspect isn’t a reality for nut allergies, but is for gluten free. People without coeliac disease buy gluten free products believing them to be healthier, lighter, or part of a wellness trend. That lifestyle demand goes beyond the clinical population alone, which is exactly why major brands keep expanding gluten-free ranges e.g. Barilla, General Mills, Kraft Heinz and others have all launched gluten free lines in the past two years. There is no equivalent lifestyle market for nut free, nobody avoids nuts because it's trendy. The entire market is people with allergies, at risk of anaphylaxis. At first glance this makes nut allergies commercially less attractive to mass manufacturers, even though the consequences of getting it wrong are likely to be severe.
Our view is that nut allergies are massively underserved; there are at least 1 million people with nut allergies in the UK alone [3], who are all looking for staple, routine options. Most adults and allergy parents living with anaphylaxis have developed their own routines to navigate this, but much could be done to provide more choices, reliability, and convenience - the same things offered to other allergies and dietary choices.
nutfreed’s experience at trade shows
The nutfreed team saw this in person while attending various trade shows focused on allergy safe food. It’s always great to be bringing together various allergy communities, though the products and stalls are always dominated by gluten free businesses, and brands that are sometimes trying to force themselves into an allergen free category.
We even saw small pots of differently seasoned tree nuts being handed out openly as samples by a business offering gluten free options. For conferences attended by people with anaphylactic nut allergies, this is of course anxiety inducing and a cross-contamination risk, but more generally could speak to nut allergies as an afterthought within the space. Another gluten free brand told us that no one had ever asked them about tree nuts or peanuts in 3 years of selling their food at shows. This points toward two things; that nut allergies are not accommodated as much as others, and that people with nut allergies generally aren’t interested in gluten free products if they themselves aren’t intolerant or coeliac.
However, we had a lot of exciting conversations trying to question this status quo and understand what can be done. We found that there are quite a few products that are safely nut free, though they aren’t being marketed towards nut allergies. This centred around the fact that there isn’t really any easy way to reach people with nut allergies, or for people with a nut allergy to find new products.
So, what’s the future of nut free shopping?
Nut free shopping clearly isn’t impossible, though free from aisles in their current state don’t seem to offer many options. The more reliable approach is building a verified list of brands and products with demonstrated nut allergen controls, rather than simply an absence of nuts in the ingredient list. This is slower to build than walking down a supermarket aisle and hoping for the best, but it's the only approach that matches the risk most nut allergies carry. Staying on top of these brands in case they change anything in their production or manufacturing process, and therefore labelling, is equally important.
Free from aisles have done a great job for the population they were built around. The mistake is assuming that they benefit everyone with a dietary restriction equally, when in practice gluten free commercial momentum seems to have shaped how that shelf space is organised. Nut allergy, despite being one of the most dangerous and commonly fatal food allergies in the UK, is not represented well on supermarket shelves.
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