We should be REQUIRING food apps (like Wendy’s, Dunkin’, Chick Fil A, etc.) to have a feature that allows customers to state their food allergies instead of having to inconvenience them by going into said store in person, often just to have their order made incorrectly anyways. This forces people to experience long wait times and waste gas going through the drive-thru when the understaffed workplaces don’t have enough people to manage the dining room.

I have a rarer allergy to a very common ingredient (cinnamon) and places, like Starbucks specifically, have NO way to specify that my request isn’t just preference, it is allergy-related. I like to order in app, mostly because I am an autistic teenager and socialisation is very hard for me.. but mistakes happen, or instructions get ignored entirely. Allergies are no joke, and people with allergies should be able to eat food and enjoy it like everyone else without having to go through the hassle of waiting for an order to be remade.

Places like Starbucks have a feature in-app to mark ‘no [ingredient], but that doesn’t always mean that they listen. What should be done, specifically in this case, is to add a tab under the ‘personal info’ section that allows a person to disclose their allergies. There could be a list of ingredients that are used in their products and you could choose to hide items with that ingredient, or ensure that it doesn’t get included if it is an add-in.

Make this happen, and you remove one inconvenience caused by an allergy— a thing that people can’t control. We’ve made steps by having ingredient lists, but now we need to make sure nobody slips up. People with rarer allergies still matter.