Allergen data you can put your name to.
Supplier allergen information arrives as PDFs, spreadsheets, CSV exports and photographs of paper — every one laid out differently, and some of them contradicting themselves. CatalogHub reads them all, matches them to the products you actually buy, and holds every value for a named human sign-off before a single allergen reaches Hops.
Your suppliers all speak a different allergen dialect
Allergen data is the most safety-critical data a hospitality business holds — and it arrives in the least reliable format of anything you’re sent. Collect specs from a handful of suppliers and this is what turns up:
Ticks that disagree
One supplier’s tick means “contains”. Another’s means “free from”. Same symbol, opposite meaning.
The meaningful blank
An empty cell might mean “no” — or “we didn’t answer”. For an allergen, those are very different statements.
The mystery dash
Everything marked “–”, with the meaning defined in a legend somewhere else in the document. Miss the legend, misread the product.
Three kinds of “yes”
“Contains”, “may contain” and “made on a line that also handles” are three different statements for a kitchen — and they get freely mixed.
Whose codes are these?
Product codes on a spec sheet are not always the supplier’s own SKUs — they can be a data provider’s or manufacturer’s codes.
The invisible spreadsheet
Some workbooks look empty to a computer and can only be read the way a person reads them.
Half an answer
Many sheets only list what a product does contain — which is not the same as confirming the other allergens are absent.
Self-contradictions
A document can declare an allergen in the detail while its own summary row says the product is free from it.
Any one of these, hand-typed into your systems in a hurry, is how a wrong allergen quietly gets in front of a guest.The problem isn’t effort — it’s that re-keying chaos by hand is unverifiable.
AI does the drudgery. Humans make every call.
CatalogHub is built on one rule: nothing reaches Hops that can’t be traced to a supplier document and a named signature. The pipeline automates everything that should be automated — and refuses to automate the judgement.
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Upload anything
PDF spec sheets, Excel workbooks, CSV exports, images — in whatever layout the supplier favours. Files uploaded together become one declaration with one sign-off.
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AI extraction that shows its working
Every allergen value is extracted with a pointer to the exact page, row or cell it came from. Anything the AI can’t confidently interpret is marked unreadable — never guessed.
Gate: Unreadable values block sign-off until a person resolves them - 3
Matched to the products you actually buy
Source rows are matched to your live catalogue by SKU and name. Exact matches can be accepted in bulk; anything less than exact waits for a person to approve it. Rows that match nothing you buy are excluded with a written reason — visible, never silently dropped.
Gate: Partial matches always need human approval - 4
Review with the evidence beside you
You confirm each allergen statement against the original document — one click away — for all 14 UK regulated allergens. Coverage is declared honestly: a spec that only lists what’s present signs as partial, with the caveat on record.
Gate: “Complete” requires reviewed coverage of all 14 allergens - 5
Signed, locked, synced
An authorised person in your business signs each declaration. It becomes immutable — a permanent, auditable record — and syncs into Hops, so the allergen answer at the pass matches the evidence in the file.
Gate: Only your named signatories can sign — never us, never a supplier
Built like safety data, because it is safety data
A blank is never a “no”.
Products that arrive with empty allergen grids are excluded, not recorded as allergen-free.
The safe reading wins.
When a document contradicts itself, the specific positive declaration is kept and the contradiction rejected — on record.
“May contain” is not “contains”.
Precautionary statements are captured as exactly what they are, never flattened into a yes or a no.
Suppliers never write to your data.
Everything a supplier submits becomes a declaration for your review. Nothing lands without your signature.
The end of the spreadsheet chase
Getting covered is a project. Staying covered shouldn’t be. For every product still missing allergen data, closing the gap is one click:
Click “Request from supplier”
The supplier gets an email listing exactly the products you need, with a secure link — no account required on their side.
They answer in whatever format they favour
Spec sheets, spreadsheets, or item-by-item answers on the page — the same extraction engine parses it.
It comes back as a declaration, not a chore
Extracted, matched to your catalogue, and waiting for your review — with every value traceable to its source.
You sign, it syncs
The same gate as always: nothing reaches Hops without your signature.
Know exactly what’s in everything you serve — and prove it.
Allergen declarations are part of CatalogHub. If your allergen data lives in a folder of PDFs and a good memory, let’s fix that.