January 2026. New York City.
We exhibited at NRF Big Show — the largest retail and foodservice gathering in the world, drawing 40,000+ leaders to the Javits Center every January. We went for the same reason every food and retail operator walked the floor: to see what's coming.
We left with a clearer answer than we expected.
The NY Allergen Labeling Law takes effect November 2026. FSMA 204 follows in 2028. Most operators we spoke with knew the dates. Almost none had started.
That gap is the entire reason we're here.
Four days at the show
Over four days, we sat down with leaders from QSR chains, fast-casual brands, global beverage manufacturers, and contract foodservice operators. Different categories, different scales — same question.
"How do we actually do this?"
Not "what does the law say." Not "what kind of label do we need." The real question is operational: how do you generate accurate, compliant labels across hundreds of sites, every day, without breaking the kitchen?
That's the part most software gets wrong.
What the NY Allergen Labeling Law actually requires
The NY allergen law expands existing food labeling rules to cover prepared and packaged foods sold in retail and foodservice settings across New York State. From November 2026, every applicable item needs clear, consistent allergen disclosure at the point of sale.
The compliance challenge isn't reading the law. It's executing against it across hundreds or thousands of SKUs, kitchens, and sites — every day, with every menu change, every recipe override, every shift handover.
We've seen this exact pattern before.
The Natasha's Law parallel
When the UK passed Natasha's Law in 2021, the same scramble played out. Operators underestimated the operational lift. Spreadsheets and one-off label printers weren't enough. The ones who handled it cleanly were the ones who treated labeling as infrastructure — connected to the data systems already running the business.
Today, Dill has printed over 40 million compliant labels for operators including Co-Op, Atis, BrewDog, Shell, Esso, BP, Jamie Oliver, Busaba, and others.
The pattern is consistent across every customer:
- 25% reduction in food waste
- 60% reduction in time spent on labeling operations
- 416 hours earned back per site, per year
Same shape. Same scramble. Different country.
Labels are the output. Integration is the problem.
Here's what we learned in the UK, and what we're seeing again now:
The labeling itself is the easy part. The hard part is upstream.
Your label can only be as accurate as the data feeding it. If your POS doesn't talk to your kitchen system, if your ERP holds the recipe but the printer doesn't see it, if a chef changes a spec at 6am and the label still says yesterday's allergens — you fail an audit.
This is why Dill is built as infrastructure, not an app. We plug directly into the systems operators already run on:
- POS platforms — Toast, Clover, Shopify, Lightspeed, and others, via our posHub integration with Foodhub for Business
- ERP and bakery systems — Cybake and others, for operators where production planning lives upstream of the label
- Multi-site workflows — central recipe management, site-level overrides, real-time sync across locations
Design it. Print it. Track it. One source of truth, every label, every site.
Why we partnered with Brother
Software solves the data problem. Hardware solves the floor problem.
Every Dill customer prints on Brother. We chose them because their printers are built for the environments that actually break other hardware — heat, grease, volume, the back-of-house at 7am on a Saturday. The TD-2D in particular handles real production loads without the reliability issues that turn compliance software into shelf-ware.
It's a partnership we wanted the city to see.
And then we lit up Times Square
On the night before the show opened, we watched the Dill x Brother billboard go live in Times Square from the Marriott Marquis. It wasn't a vanity move. It was the clearest way we knew to say what's coming:
Retail labeling infrastructure. Solved.
For the operators who walked past it on their way to the Javits Center the next morning, that was the message. For the ones who didn't see it, the next four days at our booth made the same case.
What happens next: NRA Chicago, May 2026
NRF was where we made the case. NRA Chicago — May 16–19, 2026 — is where we make it again, this time alongside Brother directly.
We'll be running live demos at Brother International, booth #6945, all four days. Real labels, real POS data, real end-to-end traceability for the operators who want to walk into November ready instead of scrambling.
If you're heading to McCormick Place, find us. If you're a New York operator and you haven't started yet, the clock is now under six months.
We've done this before. We're doing it again.