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Warnings printed on packaged foods in supermarkets across Australia are now so overused they have lost meaning for consumers wary of triggering an allergic response, experts say.
Researchers have found that despite Australia's food safety regime being among the world's best, crucial information about products is not passed onto shoppers in the form of accurate labelling.
Professor Katie Allen from the Murdoch Children's Institute, who co-authored the research, said food labelling could vary in its effectiveness.
"We think that people who have food allergies are now currently taking risks by eating foods that are unlabelled," she said.
"Those unlabelled foods, some of them are very safe because people have been through a risk assessment process, and the others are completely unsafe because no-one's actually checking to see what foods have allergens and what don't."
According to Maria Said from Allergy and Anaphylaxis Australia, efforts to communicate risks with consumers are lagging.
"The difficulty is that we have so many products with precautionary labels on them, such as 'may contain traces of'," Ms Said said.
"There is no regulation around this — it's voluntary."
Australian food manufacturers and retailers have created a risk assessment process known as voluntary incidental trace allergen labelling, or VITAL, but Ms Said said the industry could still do more.
"There is more that we can be doing for people with food allergies — some of the bigger players are trying to do what they can as far as food labelling, but there is no consistency."
But the industry's peak body, the Australian Food and Grocery Council, has defended the efforts being made by manufacturers to protect customers.
"The important thing is that food products are obviously made in food processing facilities, and there is a requirement that we label the allergens when they are ingredients," the council's Geoffrey Annison said.
"But there is a chance that some ingredients can cross over into different lines, [and] in those situations, they may put 'may contain' on the food label."
Dr Annison said labels such as 'may contain' gave consumers the opportunity to make an educated purchasing decision.
"We can always try and make warnings clearer, but these are not warnings, these are really advice to consumers that they may select another product if the product manufacturer is not absolutely certain that there is no allergen present," he said.
But Professor Allen said he wanted the effort stepped up.
"Some manufacturers want to be safe and responsible, so they're nervous. They want a zero-harm approach, which is fine," Professor Allen said.
"But we need the community to understand that they are already taking risks, and it's better to have a risk that they know about than a risk that they don't know about."
Topics: food-and-beverage, food-safety, australia
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