Website Searches for Allergy Info

Searching restaurants' websites sometimes takes a bit of extra skill

Mar 14, 2007

How to use your web browser and a word processor to search in detail for allergens and other ingredients in the lists published by some of the popular restaurants.

If you have a food allergy, a food sensitivity, if there are children with food allergies in your family, or if you just like to know all of the ingredients in your food, there are some tricks that may help in searching for the facts you need.

Locating websites for popular restaurants

Not every restaurant publishes its ingredients. Typically, the mass-market fast food and family restaurants are more likely to make this information available. If you have a concern about food allergies, you should ask the manager of the restaurant about the ingredients, whether or not you have obtained information from the internet beforehand.

To find the website for a chain restaurant is usually straightforward. Using the search engine of your choice, type in the name of the restaurant and you will get relevant hits. Make sure to click on the information for the country you are interested in.

Finding menu information on the website

The easiest situation is when the website has a tab or a clickable link labelled Allergy Information or Ingredients or something obvious like that.

Where there is no obvious link, take your best guess at the choices you are given, e.g. Customer Service, or Menus, or Nutrition.

If this doesn't work, look on the home page to see if there is a site map available for the website. See if you can locate any useful links in the site map.

Alternatively, you can see if there is a search function anywhere on the website. Keywords to use include (one at a time): ingredients, allergy, allergen, menus, nutrition, nutritional.

If you are searching for a particular ingredient, search for it by name, e.g. sunflower oil. If this gives you hits with all different kinds of oils, just search sunflower.

If you are searching for a category of ingredients, e.g. dairy products, first try searching for the entire category, using search terms such as dairy, milk, lactose, and any others that apply to you. What you are hoping for is a list of all the products that a person with a dairy sensitivity would want to avoid, or a list of all the products that do not have dairy.

If you plan to order a specific thing, e.g. a certain kind of burger or sandwich, located that item on the site map or using the search function, or from any meal menus you may already have found. Once you have located a list of the ingredients for that product, see if there are any further clickable links to get more specific.

For example, the first level of ingredients for a sandwich might say it has a bun, meat, and pickles. See if there is a way of finding out what exactly is in each of those.

Sometimes this leads to a list of ingredients which turns up in tiny print and is full of long names all jammed together in a paragraph. Very difficult to read this on the screen.

In most browsers, there is a Find command which will let you search for a particular word or phrase on the screen. In Internet Explorer, you can get to Find in a couple of ways.

Using the Find command, type in the term you are searching for, and see if it is there.

Another way to read the list of ingredients is to paste them into a more legible document. Open your Notepad, Word document, or other word processing program and start a blank document.

Try to select the paragraph you are interested in. Quite often you will have to select the entire screen. You can do this quickly by pressing Control and a. Then press Control and c to copy the text.

Paste the text into the open blank document, but paste it as text only, since you don't want all the pictures and links. In Microsoft Word, you select Edit / Paste Special / Text to accomplish this.

Then you will have a document with a lot of useless information, and the relevant text.

Finally, if you are not satisfied that your search has been completely thorough, print the document and read it carefully on paper (just the part that lists the ingredients for the thing you are interested in - you can delete the useless bits first).

Ingredients change over time

The lists that you see today may be different tomorrow or next week. Do an up to date search if you are concerned.

Don't forget oils and cooking products

Sometimes your allergen is not an actual ingredient but is used on the grill or in the cooking process. There is no standard place where these are listed. Use the search techniques, particularly the site map and the search function, to review the entire website of the restaurant.

Contacting restaurants

There is a heading on the home page of almost every business with a website telling you how to get in touch with them. If you have any questions at all, go straight to the source for information.

The copyright of the article Website Searches for Allergy Info in Disabled Travelers Safety/Health is owned by Jill Browne. Permission to republish Website Searches for Allergy Info in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.