University dining halls lack food allergy labeling, access to epinephrine
Key takeaways:
- 11 out 217 schools carried undesignated stock epinephrine.
- 76% of schools had food allergy friendly stations.
- 42% of schools did not label food ingredients.
SAN DIEGO — College students with food allergies may find difficulty in finding ingredient labeling and emergency epinephrine access in dining halls, according to a presentation here.
The results of this investigation were presented at the 2025 American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology/World Allergy Organization Joint Congress.
Lead study author Preena Shroff, an undergraduate student at Northwestern University and student researcher at the Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research within Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, explained that she began this study due to her personal experiences with navigating food allergies on a college campus.
“I have a lot of food allergies, and I’m a college student,” Shroff told Healio. “Because of my experiences, I want to gain more of an understanding on what schools are doing across the country in order to accommodate students with food allergies.”
Shroff further said full ingredient labeling, epinephrine access and safety from cross-contamination are aspects she finds important for college dining halls.
The study looked at 217 different schools that were on the Food Allergy Research & Education college search site during summer 2024.
“The college search tool has all this information that they’ve collected and compiled together,” Shroff said. “You look up a certain school, and then you can find all this information about whether or not the school is taking cross-contamination precautions, whether or not they’re posting their ingredients, if they’re training their staff.”
Some other measures the study team looked at were the presence of allergy-friendly stations and undesignated stock epinephrine.
“We looked at 217 schools and ranked them by small, medium and large,” Shroff said. “So, small schools are less than 5,000 undergraduate enrollment, medium is between 5,000 and 15,000 and large is over 15,000 undergraduate enrollment. From there, we analyzed different levels of whether or not schools are providing those accommodations.”
Among the schools with fewer than 5,000 students, 10% presented ingredients of the food in their dining halls and 2.9% had accessible epinephrine autoinjectors (EAI). At schools with between 5,000 to 15,000 students, 12% posted ingredient lists and 2.6% had EAIs. Among large schools with over 15,000 students, 16% labeled their food ingredients and 10% had EAIs in their dining halls.
Out of all 217 schools, about 76% had food allergy-friendly stations, but 42% did not label ingredients at all. Further, more than 95% of college dining halls as well as two-thirds of campus emergency responders did not have epinephrine.
“Over 14% of university emergency responders do not carry epinephrine on hand, meaning that if a university emergency responder or a campus responder is arriving to the anaphylactic emergency, in over 14% of those schools that we looked at, they will not have the epinephrine, so they will not be able to provide support for that anaphylactic emergency,” Shroff said.
Shroff also noted that approximately half of the schools take cross-contamination precautions, such as using separate utensils for cutting or preparing allergen-friendly food on a separate table or in a separate area of the kitchen.
Another result from the study highlighted by Shroff includes the very low number of schools that carry undesignated stock epinephrine.
“We found that out of the 217 universities that we looked at, only 11 of them have undesignated stock epinephrine in their dining areas,” she said. “And that’s honestly the big point of this. Campuses can label all their ingredients, they can make sure their emergency responders are carrying epinephrine and know how to use it, they can train all their dining staff. But at the end of the day, sometimes mistakes happen.
“If a student is having an allergic reaction in the dining hall and they’re not carrying epinephrine or the epinephrine they have isn't working, then there is no solution,” Shroff continued. “The reason why this is so important is because delayed epinephrine administration can cause death for students who have anaphylaxis. For that reason, it’s very important that schools are providing that for their students.”
Reference:
- Safety measures needed for college students with food allergies. https://www.aaaai.org/about/news/news/2025/college. Published Feb. 10, 2025. Accessed Feb. 27, 2025.
For more information:
Preena Shroff can be reached at preena.shroff@gmail.com.
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