How to manage dietary requirements at a retreat
Table of Contents
We'd come down after a reception one night in Barcelona, into the room we were using as the office, to grab a laptop and go back to bed. A colleague from the IT team was sitting there with an EpiPen in his hand. He'd picked something up at the reception without asking what was in it, and he thought he might be about to have a reaction.
He was fine. There was also nothing on any table telling him what he was eating.
That's the version of this that happens far more often than the version anybody plans for. Dietary restrictions get collected carefully at registration; they get sent to the caterer, the plated meals are handled beautifully, and then there's a buffet or a reception where forty small things sit on trays with no labels and nobody standing nearby who knows what's in any of it.
What dietary restrictions actually cover
Dietary restrictions are any limits on what a guest can or will eat. They come from four different places, and separating them matters because they carry completely different consequences.
Food allergies. An immune response, sometimes severe. Reactions range from mild to anaphylaxis, which is why a guest with a serious allergy may carry epinephrine.
Food intolerance and medical conditions. A food intolerance is a digestive response rather than an immune one, so it makes somebody unwell rather than putting them in danger. This group also covers digestive disorders and any eating pattern following medical guidance, including diets managed around blood sugar.
Religious beliefs and cultural practice. Requirements that may also change by season or by day rather than staying constant all year.
Preferences and chosen diets. Anything somebody has decided not to eat, for reasons that are entirely theirs.
Every one of these is worth accommodating well. Only the first two can send somebody to hospital.
A list of dietary restrictions you'll actually see
Here's what shows up on real registration forms, grouped the way a caterer thinks about them.
Allergies. The nine major food allergens named in US federal law are milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame, which was added in 2023. The UK regulates fourteen. Peanut and tree nut allergies come up most, shellfish is close behind, and sesame is more common than most hosts expect.
Medical. Celiac disease, which isn't an allergy and where cross-contamination still matters enormously. Lactose intolerance. A diabetic diet, where timing of meals can matter as much as content. Low sodium and low FODMAP, both usually following medical guidance.
Religious. A kosher diet and a halal diet are the two you'll meet most often, and both may require certified sourcing rather than just an ingredient swap. Ask rather than assume, since observance varies a great deal person to person.
Chosen diets. A vegetarian diet, excluding meat and fish. A vegan diet, excluding all animal products including dairy, eggs, and honey. Pescatarian, which includes fish. A dairy-free diet, sometimes medical and sometimes chosen. A keto diet or a low-carb diet, both limiting carbohydrates. A paleo diet, which excludes grains, legumes, and dairy.
If you want the short answer on the most common dietary restrictions at events: vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, nut allergies, shellfish allergies, kosher, and halal. Gluten-free is consistently the one guests complain about, and the complaint is almost never that there was nothing they could eat. It's that they couldn't tell which things those were.
Separate the allergies from the preferences at the point you collect them
This is the single most useful thing in this post for a first-time host, and it costs you one extra question on a form.
PCMA's guidance to event organizers is to collect dietary information at initial registration and to distinguish allergy-related requests from dietary preferences. Most people collect them in one box and treat them the same, which means a vegan and a guest with a severe shellfish allergy arrive at your caterer looking identical.
They aren't the same request. A vegan needs a good meal she's happy with. A guest with a shellfish allergy needs a kitchen that knows about cross-contamination and a server who can confirm which plate is hers. Sending both down the same channel is how the serious one gets handled with the weight of a preference.
One guest I worked with was allergic to so many things that she'd tell us it was easier to say what she could eat. Chicken with salt and pepper, essentially. Super basic. That's a person who has spent years being handed a plate somebody guessed at, and she'd rather give you the short list than watch you work through the long one.
I've also known someone who stopped coming to events altogether because of how restricted her diet was. The cost of getting this wrong is invisible, because she doesn't complain. She just stops registering. Inclusive dining is mostly this: the number of people who quietly opt out is larger than the number who tell you.
What to ask on the registration form
Five fields, and they take a guest thirty seconds.
Is this an allergy or a preference? A simple two-option question, because it routes everything after it.
Which ingredients? Open text, not a dropdown. A dropdown gets you the eight you thought of.
Is cross-contamination a concern? This matters enormously to a caterer and almost nobody asks it. Somebody who can't eat a dish cooked in the same pan needs a different plan from somebody avoiding an ingredient. The precise term kitchens use is cross-contact, though most guests will say cross-contamination and mean the same thing.
May our catering lead contact you directly? For anything complicated, one conversation between the guest and the person cooking beats six between you and everyone else.
A submission deadline, tied to your caterer's final numbers date rather than a round number you picked.
Then say something on the form itself. We always included a line asking guests to notify us as soon as possible so we could work with whoever we needed to and accommodate the best we could. We'd repeat it in a note at the bottom of the printed menus, and again in the event app. The point of saying it three times is that the guest who didn't mention it at registration, because she didn't want to be a bother, still has two more chances.
Why event organizers started talking about this
In December 2024, Dominique Brown, a 34-year-old content creator and co-founder of Black Girl Disney, died after eating at a brand event at a venue in Los Angeles. PCMA reported that she had a severe peanut allergy and, citing other reporting, that she had been "assured the allergen was not an ingredient in the food she was consuming." She became unwell after eating and died a short time later. Skift Meetings described it as a "reported food allergy" and assigned no fault to anyone.
The brand said it was investigating. The venue said it was running a separate internal review. The brand later said it had not yet received the information it had asked venue operators for in order to establish what happened that night.
There is no public final investigation report, no regulatory finding, and no court outcome. Nobody outside those reviews knows what the food was, what was said, or where in the chain anything went wrong, and it would be wrong to write as though anyone does.
What her death did was put this conversation in front of a lot of event organizers who hadn't thought about it in years, and that's the reason it belongs in a post like this.
Where the information usually stops
For the argument itself, two cases are documented, and both land in the same place.
In 2017, Owen Carey ate a chicken burger at a Byron restaurant in London on his eighteenth birthday and died. Parliament recorded the case in 2023, noting that he had told waiting staff about his allergy, and that because of miscommunication the information "was not passed to the kitchen." The burger had been marinated in buttermilk.
In 2019, a restaurant called Koh Thai Tapas was fined over ten thousand pounds after a customer's online order noted a peanut allergy, the warning was printed on the receipt, and the kitchen never saw it. The customer had a reaction.
Both cases have the same shape. The guest did everything asked of her. The information existed in writing. It stopped one step short of the person cooking.
Design for that step, because it's the one you can't see from where you're standing. You send the list. What you can't observe is whether the person plating the food read it.
The closed loop, and it's five steps
The UK Food Standards Agency, a government regulator with nothing to sell you, sets out what has to be true for allergen information to actually work. It reads as obvious, and almost nobody does all five.
The requirement is accurately recorded.
It's shared in writing with the person preparing the food, not just a venue sales contact.
It's understood by whoever is preparing it.
The finished dish is identifiable to both the server and the guest.
The server verbally confirms it at delivery.
Step five is the one everybody skips, and it's the cheapest food safety measure on the list. Somebody puts a plate down and says the name out loud: this is the dairy-free one. That single sentence is the last chance to catch an error, and it costs nothing.
What I actually did, and where it worked
For the big conferences, the process was the same every time.
Once we pulled the final guest list, we'd look at the dietary requirements against the menu options the venue or caterer had given us, to see what would work. A lot of the time, especially with custom menus, we'd just email the entire list to the venue and ask what they could do to accommodate it. Then the venue helped us map out what we could and couldn't choose from, or built special menus for the people who needed them.
That direct handoff is the whole thing. The list goes to the venue, and the venue talks to its own kitchen, which is a shorter chain than me trying to relay it.
We did the same for offsite dinners at restaurants, because they always want the dietary list too so they can plan.
One difference worth knowing about, and it caught me out when I first started running events in Europe. In the US, a private dining room usually gives you two or three options per course, and the guest chooses at the table. In Europe, you're picking one appetizer, one main, and one dessert for everyone, which I found a bit challenging. Either way, the dietary list still goes to the restaurant, and they accommodate around it.
Menu planning that doesn't need a separate menu
The best version of this is where fewer guests need a special plate at all, because the standard menu already reaches them.
Give every meat option a vegetarian counterpart, not one vegetarian dish for the whole event. If there are three mains, there are three ways to eat, and one of them doesn't involve animal products.
Build the vegetarian dish around a real plant-based protein. Beans, lentils, chickpeas, tofu, or tempeh. A plate of roasted vegetables is a side dish that's been promoted, and guests notice.
Watch what the vegetarian option quietly contains. Cheese, cream, butter, and eggs are in most of them, which means a dish labeled vegetarian may be no use at all to a vegan or to somebody dairy-free. Say what's in it rather than what it isn't.
Have alternative milk at every coffee station, oat and one other, and put it where people can see it rather than behind the counter.
Keep sauces and dressings on the side where you can. It turns one unusable plate into a usable one without a special order, and it's the single easiest change to ask a caterer for.
We'd generally avoid fish as the main protein, since it's a food a lot of people quietly won't eat and won't tell you about.
Buffets and receptions are where this breaks down
A seated dinner has a built-in safeguard, because the server should be asking about dietary requirements as a matter of course. The structure catches things.
A buffet has no such structure. Nor does a reception, which is worse, because people are standing up with a drink in one hand, taking things off a passing tray.
Three things fix most of it.
Label everything on the table, next to the dish. Name of the dish and the allergens in it. Not a chalkboard at the end of the run, and not one sign covering the whole table. Guests take what's in front of them. Treat these like ingredient labels rather than decoration.
Make sure the wait staff can answer. If somebody asks what's in the thing on the tray, "I'm not sure" is the wrong answer, and it's an entirely predictable one. Whoever briefs the service team should include this.
Keep the allergen-free items separate and served differently. A plated portion brought out, or a section of the table set apart with its own serving utensils, rather than one dish in a row of twenty where cross-contamination happens by the fourth guest.
The Barcelona reception needed exactly that, and none of it is complicated. Nobody had labeled anything, so a guest with an allergy had no way to make a decision except to ask, and there was nobody obvious to ask.
What to ask the venue and the caterer
Get answers in writing before you sign, and ask them of the caterer directly rather than only the salesperson. This applies to corporate catering and to a small retreat kitchen equally.
Who owns your kitchen's allergy protocol, and what is it?
Can you prepare allergen-free dishes in a clean, separate area?
Can you give us a full ingredient and allergen matrix, including sauces, dressings, marinades, and garnishes?
What happens if a supplier changes a product between now and our event?
Who personally delivers the named meal to the named guest?
How do you label a buffet, and who does it?
What's your process if a guest tells you about a requirement on the day?
Are your service staff briefed on allergens, and by whom?
The sauces and garnishes question earns its place. Owen Carey's burger was marinated, which is exactly the kind of detail that doesn't show up in a dish name.
Keep an allergen register, and keep it restricted
For anything with real safety attached, a short separate document is worth building. Restricted access, because it's medical information about named people.
Guest name. The named allergens. Contact details. Which meal times they're attending. The caterer's written confirmation of what they'll be served. The final service confirmation on the day. The name of the person on site responsible for it.
That last field is the one that turns a list into a plan. Somebody has to be the person who checks, and on the day it should be a name rather than a job title.
Where the law sits, and this isn't legal advice
In the US, federal allergen labeling law is primarily about packaged foods, and it's the reason ingredient labels on a supermarket shelf carry allergen statements. The FDA is explicit that those requirements don't extend to food prepared in a restaurant or displayed at a bakery, and it advises people with allergies to ask staff instead.
The FDA Food Code does recommend allergen notification for unpackaged food, including from caterers, and it's a model code adopted differently state by state. So there is no single nationwide rule binding every catered event in the country.
The UK is more explicit. Food businesses have to provide information on fourteen regulated allergens; it applies to catered food, and it applies even when the food is given away for free.
The line worth understanding, and I'd rather say it plainly than leave it out: outsourcing the food doesn't necessarily remove your own duty of care as the organizer. That's particularly true where you've given a guest an assurance, where you control the food arrangements, or where you haven't made reasonable checks on your supplier.
I'm not a lawyer, and none of this is legal advice about your event. Treat it as a reason to ask questions and keep written records, rather than as a description of what you're liable for.
Where to start
Open your registration form and split the dietary field in two. One question asking whether it's an allergy or a preference, one open field for the ingredients. Add the cross-contamination question underneath.
Then send the whole list to your caterer in writing rather than summarizing it, and ask them one question back: who reads this, and how will your server confirm it at the table?
