Short answer: allergen disclosure is mandatory, and a reference sample of every dish must be kept for 72 hours. Türkiye's Food Codex Regulation on Food Labelling and Consumer Information ended its three-year transition on 1 January 2020, and since then the 14 allergens listed in its Annex 1 must be disclosed for unpackaged food served in mass catering venues, through menus, boards or leaflets. The sample rule sits in Article 40(6) of the Regulation on Official Controls of Food and Feed: businesses that produce on site and serve to groups, along with meal factories, must keep one sample from every batch of every dish they cook for seventy-two hours under suitable conditions. A third rule arrived in 2025. Since 28 July 2025, food retail and mass catering venues must display the Ministry's food business QR code where consumers can see it. Below, in order: who carries the liability, which documents your caterer needs, allergen and ingredient disclosure, samples, temperature limits, staff certification and outdoor build considerations.
Who is liable for food safety at an event?
Legally, the food business operator is. Law No. 5996 on Veterinary Services, Plant Health, Food and Feed, dated 11 June 2010, places responsibility for food safety on whoever produces, processes and places the food on the market. The agency or company hosting the event does not fall inside that definition. You do, however, choose the supplier, build the kitchen into the venue and write the service flow, so you buy the risk even where you do not carry the statute. Article 40(5) of the Regulation on Official Controls of Food and Feed is blunt on the point: a food business operator must use products from establishments registered or approved by the Ministry in production, preparation and sale. A caterer sourcing from an unregistered kitchen pulls the whole event into the same chain. The scale of enforcement gives a sense of the stakes. According to figures announced by Agriculture and Forestry Minister İbrahim Yumaklı in December 2025, Türkiye carried out 1,350,000 inspections of food production, retail and mass catering premises during 2025, issued 32,210 administrative fines and levied a total of 2.654 billion lira. The World Health Organization's global estimate rounds out the picture: roughly 600 million people, about one in ten worldwide, fall ill each year from unsafe food, and 420,000 die. A gala serving 500 covers in one night is a small but real part of that number.
Which documents should your caterer hold? The QR code rule changed in 2025
Two documents, and both belong in the tender file. The first is the food business registration certificate. Under Law No. 5996, food businesses subject to registration must obtain it from the competent authority before starting operations, and the certificate is tied to the establishment's address and scope of activity. The second arrived last year. An amendment published in Official Gazette No. 32894 of 8 May 2025 added a seventh paragraph to Article 40 of the Regulation on Official Controls of Food and Feed: food retail and mass catering venues must display the food business QR code where the consumer can see it. The Ministry published the implementing rules on 29 May 2025, allowed a sixty-day adjustment window, and from 28 July 2025 began enforcing against businesses without one. Each QR code is generated for the specific establishment through the Ministry's reliable food portal, and a guest scanning it sees the registration record. For food production sites the scheme remains voluntary for now. The practical version is simple: ask for a copy of the registration certificate and a screenshot of the QR code when you shortlist caterers, and attach both to the contract. If an external caterer is using the venue's kitchen, check both parties, because the business cooking the food and the business serving it are often not the same.
How is allergen information given? The 14 listed substances
It is mandatory and the grace period is long gone. The Turkish Food Codex Regulation on Food Labelling and Consumer Information, published in repeated Official Gazette No. 29960 of 26 January 2017, extended allergen disclosure to unpackaged food after a three-year transition, effective 1 January 2020. Article 15(5) deals with mass catering separately: for unpackaged food served to the final consumer, the name of the food and the allergens listed in Annex 1 must be disclosed, presented legibly and visibly through menus, boards or leaflets. Annex 1 runs to 14 headings: cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, peanuts, soybeans, milk (including lactose), tree nuts, celery, mustard, sesame seeds, sulphur dioxide and sulphites (above 10 mg/kg or 10 mg/L), lupin and molluscs. The regulation's definition of a mass catering venue explicitly covers mobile vehicles and fixed or movable stalls, so the live cooking station in your foyer and the food truck in the garden are both inside the rule. Cocktail formats strain against this, because a canapé on a tray carries no label. The fix is cheap: put a card in front of every station listing the dish and its allergens, and park the full menu behind a QR code on the table card.
Why alcohol and pork-derived ingredient disclosure gets missed
The same regulation asks for one more disclosure, and at corporate events it usually surfaces faster than the allergen question. Where unpackaged food served in a mass catering venue contains ethyl alcohol and/or a substance derived from pork, the additional mandatory information in rows 6 and 7 of Annex 2 applies. For food containing a pork-derived substance, the statement that it contains a pork-derived ingredient must appear in the same field of vision as the name of the food. Where the final product contains no ethyl alcohol but alcohol was used in making it, the phrase noting that ethyl alcohol was used in production accompanies the dish name. On the event side this hides in kitchen routine: gelatine in a dessert, wine in a sauce, liqueur in a tiramisu, certain additives. At an international dealer meeting, or a launch with guests from the Gulf, that information belongs on the menu as much for courtesy as for compliance. When you sign off the menu, ask the caterer for a table with allergen and ingredient columns rather than a list of dish names. One extra approval round beats a service captain hunting for an answer at the table.
Reference samples: who takes them and for how long?
The rule is one sentence and easy to locate. Article 40(6) of the Regulation on Official Controls of Food and Feed requires public and private institutions, along with businesses that produce on site and serve to groups and meal factories, to keep one sample from every batch of every dish for seventy-two hours under suitable conditions. The trade calls these witness or reference samples. The regulation gives no weight, only suitable conditions, and storage is either chilled or frozen; common practice is roughly 100 grams of each dish in a sealed sterile container, labelled with the dish name, date, time and the person who took it. Why it matters becomes clear the moment a complaint lands. When poisoning or suspected poisoning is reported, the laboratory analysis runs directly on that sample. Without one you cannot demonstrate the source, and failing to keep it is itself actionable under Law No. 5996. Event schedules push against this rule. On a gala that runs past midnight, the seventy-two-hour mark falls on a day when the crew has long since scattered and the fridge belongs to the venue. Write one line into the contract: who takes the samples, where they are stored, and until which date and time, recorded on a form signed on the day.
Temperature limits: 65 degrees, 3 hours and the buffet problem
The reference figure for hot service is 65 degrees Celsius. The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry's Hygiene Principles and Good Practice Guide for Mass Catering Venues states that food held hot should not fall below 65 degrees and should not be held at that temperature for longer than 3 hours. The same guide names a common mistake outright: a bain-marie exists to hold food at a set temperature, not to heat cold food up. On the cold side, the storage and transport figures it gives run as follows: red meat no warmer than plus 7 degrees, poultry plus 4, minced meat plus 2, offal plus 3, dairy products plus 6, deep-frozen products no warmer than minus 18. The guide itself is voluntary, but the duty behind it is not. The Food Hygiene Regulation requires food business operators to comply with temperature control requirements, maintain the cold chain and keep records of it. What breaks the arithmetic at an event is the run of show. In a three-hour cocktail, the first tray out should not still be out at closing; service works through replenishment, not through one large tray. Outdoors, shade and wind join the equation. Putting a seafood canapé on a sunlit table causes problems not because the numbers fail but because nobody ran them.
What certification should service staff hold?
The right document to ask for is the hygiene training certificate. The Hygiene Training Regulation, published in Official Gazette No. 28698 of 5 July 2013, prohibits employing anyone without that certificate in the workplaces it covers, and makes the owner and operator primarily responsible. Its definition of retail workplaces explicitly includes catering services, workplace and institutional canteens and restaurants, so a company cooking for your event sits inside the scope. Training is delivered by institutions under the Ministry of National Education's Directorate General for Lifelong Learning, runs no fewer than eight hours, and the certificate stays valid for as long as the person works in that line. The most common mistake here comes from an old habit. Asking for a quarterly carrier examination is no longer the right question: Articles 126 and 127 of Law No. 1593 on Public Health were amended by Decree Law No. 663 of 2 November 2011, and mandatory hygiene training replaced the periodic examination. One more rule belongs to the day itself. Staff with diarrhoea, vomiting, skin lesions or open wounds do not enter the kitchen or the service floor. Putting that in the contract is safer than saying it in the morning briefing.
Catering outdoors and under canvas: what changes on build day?
A hotel ballroom and a marquee in a garden are not the same kitchen. When catering goes into a temporary structure, four things get drawn onto the site plan separately. Water first: the kitchen area needs a hand-wash basin with hot and cold running water for staff. Cold chain second: if food arrives from outside, fix the vehicle's journey time from gate to service and its waiting position in advance, because a van parked in the sun is the most common break point. Power third: if the chillers and bain-maries hang off the generator, that generator is carrying the food as well as the sound and lighting, which makes an outage more than a technical problem. Waste and pests fourth: keep the bin point off the service route and away from guest areas, and use lidded containers outdoors. Your final check before doors can be short. Registration certificate and QR code in the file, allergen column on the menu, alcohol and pork-derived disclosure done, someone named to take and store the 72-hour samples, someone named to log temperatures, hygiene certificates collected for the service team. Tales Event is based in Istanbul and delivers dealer meetings, product launches, openings, gala nights and graduation ceremonies across Türkiye, running stage, sound, lighting and LED screen production with a single crew. Send us the venue, the guest count, the menu format and the run of show, and we will fold the catering setup, document checks, allergen disclosure and temperature plan into your production plan.
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