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Celery
Celery is entry 9 of the fourteen substances Annex II of Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 makes declarable. IgE-mediated food allergy, very often mugwort- or birch-related. Where it hides, which exemptions apply, and what it cross-reacts with.
This is reference information, not a diagnosis and not a treatment plan. A pollen calendar cannot tell you what you are allergic to, and no page can clear a food as safe for you — only the label on the packet in your hand and the clinician who knows your history can do that. Anything beyond mild, short-lived symptoms in the mouth or nose — swelling that affects breathing or swallowing, hives away from the mouth, wheeze, vomiting or faintness — is an emergency question, not a reading question.
What the law says
Annex II, entry 9: “Celery and products thereof”
That wording carries the whole obligation. The substance must be declared whenever it is used in the making of a food and is still present in the finished product, even in an altered form, and it must be picked out inside the ingredient list by typeset — bold, capitals, italics, underlining or a contrasting colour. There is no legal requirement for a separate allergen box, so the ingredient list is where to look.
Source: Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, Annex II and Article 21 · checked 2026-09-06
What the reaction actually is
Celery is on the list out of all proportion to how much of it people knowingly eat, because it is used as a background flavour in an enormous amount of processed food. Both the stalk and the root — celeriac, which is the form used across this region — carry the allergens. Reactions can be systemic rather than oral, which is why it earned a place in the Annex.
Who gets it, and does it last
Celery allergy is largely an adult condition and largely a consequence of pollen sensitisation, so it appears in people who have had hay fever for years and tends to persist with it.
Where it hides
- Stock cubes, bouillon powder and gravy granules
- Soup mixes and ready soups
- Spice blends and seasoning salt
- Sausage, pâté and processed meat
- Salad dressings, ketchup and prepared sauces
- Vegetable juices
Celeriac is a standard soup and stock vegetable across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland, and celery salt sits in most seasoning mixes. The exposure that causes trouble here is almost never a raw stick of celery; it is a stock cube, a ready soup or a spice blend.
Cross-reactions
Two routes converge. Api g 1 is a birch PR-10 homologue, so birch-allergic people can react to raw celery. The mugwort route involves different, more heat-resistant proteins, and produces the pattern usually named celery-mugwort-spice syndrome: celery together with carrot, parsley, caraway, coriander, cumin, fennel, aniseed and dill.
The labelling detail
Entry 9 has no exemptions, so "celery" must appear and be emphasised even where it is a fraction of a spice mix or a stock. This is why a celery-allergic person reads powdered soups and seasoning blends more carefully than they read vegetables.
Exemptions: none. Entry 9 has no carve-outs at all, so there is no processed fraction of it that escapes the label.
Precautionary wording — “may contain”, “made in a factory that also handles” — is a separate matter: it is voluntary, unstandardised and carries no threshold. How strictly to treat it is a clinical decision, not a reading of the label. The labelling explainer sets out the whole frame, including what happens in restaurants and bakeries where there is no pack at all.
What gets misread
Because the birch route is heat-sensitive, people assume cooking always solves it. For the mugwort route it does not reliably: cooked celeriac and dried celery in a spice mix have both been reported to cause reactions, and this is one of the allergens where a home experiment is a bad idea.
Sources: Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, Annex II · Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) No 828/2014 (gluten claims) · WHO/IUIS Allergen Nomenclature · season windows from the national aerobiology monitoring programmes of Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway · cross-reaction patterns paraphrased from the allergy literature and EAACI material · checked 2026-09-06
Frequently asked questions
Is celery one of the fourteen EU allergens?
Yes, entry 9. The Regulation words it as: Celery and products thereof. It must be declared and emphasised in the ingredient list of any food sold in the EU that contains it.
Where does celery hide?
The routine unexpected sources are stock cubes, bouillon powder and gravy granules; soup mixes and ready soups; spice blends and seasoning salt; sausage, pâté and processed meat; salad dressings, ketchup and prepared sauces; vegetable juices. This is what makes the ingredient list, rather than the name of the dish, the thing to read.
Are there any labelling exemptions for celery?
No. Entry 9 carries no exemptions, so any celery-derived ingredient is declarable however small the amount.
What does celery cross-react with?
Two routes converge. Api g 1 is a birch PR-10 homologue, so birch-allergic people can react to raw celery. The mugwort route involves different, more heat-resistant proteins, and produces the pattern usually named celery-mugwort-spice syndrome: celery together with carrot, parsley, caraway, coriander, cumin, fennel, aniseed and dill.
Cereals containing gluten
Coeliac disease (autoimmune), wheat allergy (IgE) and non-coeliac wheat sensitivity — three different conditions under one entry.
Crustaceans
IgE-mediated food allergy, mainly to tropomyosin.
Eggs
IgE-mediated food allergy.
Fish
IgE-mediated food allergy, mainly to parvalbumin.
Peanuts
IgE-mediated food allergy — severe storage-protein type, or mild birch-pollen-related type.
Foods by diet and allergen
The food database filtered by written rules. A way to explore, never an allergen clearance.
Keep the log, spot the pattern
When a reaction is hard to pin down, a food and symptom log across weeks is worth more than any single meal you can remember. TempoLife keeps both in one place.