Allergen warnings on menu cards

September 11, 2026

Guided start has always asked customers what they cannot eat, and their answer has always reached you — on the subscription and on the order that follows. What it could not do was say anything back on the menu: a customer who had just told you about a dairy allergy still had to open every meal to work out which ones to skip. Map your allergens metafield and Servd marks them.

What it is

Each meal's allergens come from a Shopify product metafield you nominate — free text such as Milk, Soy, Wheat, or a list field, whichever you already keep. Servd reads it when a meal is added to a menu, exactly as it reads nutrition.

A customer who selected an allergy in guided start sees the meals containing it marked under the title — ⚠ Contains milk — with the photo dimmed. The meal can still be chosen. The mark informs the person reading it; it does not decide for them, and it does not shrink the menu they are trying to fill.

Listing allergens on every card is a separate choice, off by default. Left off, a card carries an allergen line only when it matters to the person in front of it. Turned on, every card shows its full list and that customer's own allergens are highlighted inside it.

Why it matters

Asking a customer about allergies and then handing them an unmarked menu puts the work back on them at the moment they were told it had been taken care of. The answers were already being collected and passed to your kitchen — this is the half that faces the customer.

Servd only ever states that a meal contains something. A meal whose metafield is empty shows nothing at all, because an unfilled field and a genuinely allergen-free meal look identical in the data. No meal is presented as free of anything, so a gap in your data can never read as a reassurance.

Because the source stays in Shopify, there is no second allergen sheet to maintain in Servd, and the same data serves weekly menus and templates alike.

How to set it up

On the Pro plan, open Menus, then Settings, and find Allergens on menu cards. Choose the metafield that holds your allergens and save, then click Apply to products already in menus so meals already on a menu pick theirs up. Turn on List allergens on every menu card if you want every card to carry its full list.

Check that the words line up. Open Menus, then Guided start, edit the allergies step, and make sure each option's Exclude tags list every spelling your products use: a customer clicks Gluten while your products say Wheat, and that field is the bridge between the two — list gluten, wheat and both are matched. You can fix this at any time; it takes effect on the next menu the customer opens, with nothing to re-import.

The marks follow the answers a customer gave in guided start on that device. Someone returning in a different browser sees an unmarked menu until they go through guided start again — their allergy is still recorded on their subscription and on the order either way.