Shellfish Allergy Card

Shellfish is one of the most deeply hidden allergens in East and Southeast Asian cooking. It rarely shows up as a whole shrimp on your plate — it shows up as flavor base. Japanese dashi stock can be made with dried shrimp (桜えび) or crab extract; ramen and tsukemen broths are frequently built on shellfish; and convenience-store onigiri, oden and soups routinely list えび・かに extracts on their labels.

Further south it gets harder still. Thai cooking seasons nearly everything with fish sauce (น้ำปลา, made from anchovies — a fish, but often processed alongside shellfish) and shrimp paste (กะปิ, kapi), which is the flavor base of most curry pastes and green papaya salad. Vietnamese nước mắm and mắm tôm (fermented shrimp paste), Malaysian and Singaporean belacan, Chinese oyster sauce and XO sauce (dried scallop and shrimp), and Korean fermented shrimp (새우젓) in kimchi all put shellfish protein into dishes that look completely shellfish-free.

Cross-contact is the second trap. Street-food woks and tempura fryers cook shrimp, then vegetables, in the same oil. A shellfish allergy card that only says "no shrimp" misses all of this — it needs to name the sauces, pastes and stocks, and explicitly refuse shared fryer oil. That is exactly what our card does, in the kitchen's own language.

One distinction matters on the card: crustaceans (shrimp, crab, lobster, crayfish) and molluscs (oysters, mussels, clams, scallops, squid, octopus) are separate allergen groups. EU labeling law lists them as two different allergens, and many people react to one group but not the other. Our creator lets you select "Shellfish" (crustaceans) and "Mollusks" separately, so your card never over- or under-restricts.