Which restaurants does California SB 68 apply to?

SB 68 (the ADDE Act) applies to chain restaurants with 20 or more locations operating in California. It requires the Top 9 major food allergens to be disclosed on all menus — printed, digital and QR menus included — starting July 1, 2026.

Which allergens must appear on the menu under SB 68?

The federal Top 9: milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans and sesame. Sesame became the ninth major allergen with the FASTER Act, effective January 1, 2023.

Do QR and digital menus count as "menus" under the law?

Yes. SB 68 explicitly covers digital menus, including QR-code menus. If guests order from a screen, the allergen information must be there — not only on a paper binder behind the counter.

My restaurant is not a 20+ location chain. Should I still care?

Legally you may be out of scope for now, but the direction is clear: New York has a similar requirement arriving in November 2026, and courts already apply a general duty of care when a guest asks about allergens. Showing allergens on your menu is fast becoming the standard guests expect everywhere.

California's SB 68 Is Now in Force: What the New Menu Allergen Law Means for US Restaurants (2026)

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July 1, 2026: The Day US Menus Changed

For twenty years, US food allergen law had a strange blind spot. The FALCPA law of 2004 forced every packaged food to declare major allergens, and the FASTER Act added sesame as the ninth allergen in 2023. But restaurant menus — the place where tens of millions of Americans with food allergies actually make eating decisions — were left almost untouched by federal rules.

That blind spot is closing. Since July 1, 2026, California's SB 68 (the ADDE Act) requires chain restaurants with 20 or more locations to disclose the Top 9 allergens on every menu — explicitly including digital and QR menus. It is the first US law that treats the menu itself, not the package, as the place where allergen information belongs.

The Top 9 allergens SB 68 requires on menus

1. Milk · 2. Eggs · 3. Fish · 4. Crustacean shellfish · 5. Tree nuts
6. Peanuts · 7. Wheat · 8. Soybeans · 9. Sesame (added by the FASTER Act, 2023)

Who Has to Comply — and Who Is Next

Today, the letter of the law reaches chains with 20+ locations in California. If that is you, your menus — paper, web, tablet and QR — must show the Top 9 for every item. But reading SB 68 as "only a California chain problem" would be a mistake, for three reasons:

New York follows in November 2026 with its own menu allergen requirement, and other states are drafting similar rules.
Courts already expect a duty of care. When a guest asks about allergens and gets a wrong answer, "we are a small restaurant" is not a defense.
Guests are learning to expect it. Once diners see allergens on every chain menu, an independent restaurant without them looks careless — exactly the way menus without prices look today.

Why QR Menus Are Suddenly a Compliance Tool

The most interesting part of SB 68 is that it names digital menus directly. That flips the usual story: the QR menu is no longer just a cost saver — it is the cheapest way to be compliant, because a digital menu can be updated the moment a recipe changes, while reprinting paper menus for every change costs money and takes days.

The hard part is not printing — it's knowing

The real work in allergen compliance is the analysis: knowing that a carbonara contains gluten, egg and milk even when nobody wrote it in the description; that breaded items imply wheat and egg; that most curries hide mustard. Doing that by hand across a 120-item menu, and redoing it every time the chef changes a recipe, is where mistakes happen.

How IAMenu Handles This Automatically

IAMenu detects allergens with AI using the 14 EU allergens — the strictest list in the world and a superset of the US Top 9, the UK list, Canada's priority allergens and Australia's PEAL. Every dish you add is analyzed in context (a carbonara gets gluten, egg and milk even without an ingredient list), the icons appear on your QR menu automatically, and your manual corrections are never overwritten.

That means one system covers you in California, New York, London or Madrid — and your guests can filter the menu by their own allergies in their own language.

Getting ready in one afternoon

1. Upload your menu (PDF or photos) — the AI digitizes it in minutes.
2. Allergen detection runs automatically on every item, Top 9 and EU 14 covered.
3. Review the suggestions, correct anything you know better — your corrections are protected.
4. Print the QR once. The menu behind it stays compliant every time you edit it.

Read the full state-by-state breakdown in our US menu allergen laws guide, or see how the AI allergen detection works. You can try everything free for 14 days — no card required.