**3. Results**

Between 1 January 2018 and 31 December 2021, a total of 844 food-allergen-related notifications were made by the RASFF system, the year 2019 being the one with the highest number of notifications, *n* = 241, while the years 2018, 2020, and 2021 had *n* = 207, *n* = 197, and *n* = 199, respectively. It should be remarked that, in the period studied, 79.7% of the notifications were classified as an "alert", which implies that the food presents a serious

risk on the market, requiring a rapid action generally aimed at withdrawing the product from the market. However, "information for attention and for follow-up" notifications represented only 17.4%. These types of notifications concern information that does not require a rapid action because the food product containing the undeclared allergen is still not on the market at the time of the report, or the risk is mostly considered low.

It is also relevant that, of the 844 allergen notifications reviewed, 16.6% corresponded to foods that contained two or more undeclared allergens, and could therefore potentially affect people with different allergies. Table 2 shows the proportion of each of them. It should be noted that several of these notifications revealed the presence of allergens that frequently affect children in products that easily could be consumed by them, for example, a 2018 notification that alerted about milk, soy, and wheat (in addition to mustard and celery) in organic beetroot soup.

**Table 2.** Percentage of RASFF notifications that informed about food products that simultaneously contained two or more undeclared allergens between 1 January 2018 and 31 December 2021.


It can be observed that, from all those notifications, the main countries that emitted notifications about allergen hazards were Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. However, it should be remarked that 2021 data did not report notifications from the United Kingdom since it was no longer part of the EU as of January 2021. Regarding the countries of origin of the products concerned, it was observed that the main provenance was EU countries (77.6%), while 22.4% of notifications implied a non-EU/EEA country as the origin of the food.

From all of these notifications, it can be seen that the detection of the undeclared allergen in the food product came from a company's own check (51.1%), followed by official controls on the market (32.8%), and consumer complaints (9.6%). Notifications due to food poisoning represented 2.1% of the total notifications. These percentages remained very similar over the years studied.

In terms of responses to the notifications, the most frequently taken actions were the foods being recalled from the consumers (38.2%) and withdrawn from the market (19.9%) (Figure 1). All of these results are very relevant since they imply that the food products that contained the undeclared allergens were already on the market and could have already been consumed by an allergic person.
