Baby shower invitations with allergies: the snack mistake

Baby shower invitations with allergies are usually sent after the food is booked. That's the mistake: a buffet for twenty-five people, and two days before the party your phone lights up — "by the way, my daughter is coeliac." Now you're calling whoever is cooking at nine at night to ask whether the cake has flour in it, and whether the olives sat next to the bread.

It isn't a menu problem. It's an order-of-decisions problem: you guessed the numbers, ordered the food, and only started finding out who can eat what afterwards. Swap those three steps and the same baby shower runs itself.

Baby shower invitations with allergies: get the order right

Invitation first. Replies next. The food last. The headcount, and anything a guest has told you about what they eat, should come from the same place — the reply list inside the invitation. Not from what you remember of the last conversation, and not from a guess you made on Tuesday when you rang the caterer.

• Send the invitation before you book the food, not after. The reply list is what tells you how many people are actually eating.
• Real example: a buffet for 25, and two days out, one guest mentions her daughter is coeliac. With a week's margin you ask for a separate flourless cake. On the eve of the party, you can't ask for anything.
• Re-read the reply list before you confirm the numbers. The answer is in there, not in what you remember from the last conversation.
• Give whoever is cooking at least a week between the reply deadline and the shopping. The cake and the drinks need the same margin as the savoury food.

The WhatsApp group is not a form

Twenty-five people in a group chat, and one message: "Does anyone have any allergies?" Half of them never see it. It disappears under stickers, a change of time and three replies from yesterday. Someone answers with a two-minute voice note saying they "don't eat everything", and you still can't tell whether that's an egg allergy, a diet or a dislike.

Write it into the confirmation form instead, as your own question: "Is there anything you can't eat? Tell us and we'll plan for it." Keep the three things apart — an allergy, an intolerance and a preference — so the answer doesn't arrive as one vague sentence. Ask for the name of the person it affects, not just the dish; in a family of four, you need to know whose plate is whose. In the invitation, every reply lands in one ordered list, next to the name of whoever wrote it.

A baby shower with allergies isn't harder to plan. It's just planned in a different order: invitation, replies, then the food.

The day of the baby shower: the shared bowl

On the day, two spoons in the same bowl of nuts fixes nothing: if you're allergic, you can't touch what the shared spoon has already touched. A separate plate with a handwritten label does, and a quiet word with whoever is serving saves your guest from explaining it in front of everyone. The snacks are the blind spot — the kids' biscuits, the olives, the hummus and grandma's cake deserve the same question as the main dish. Then start where the order starts. A Send The Joy invitation is a page of its own, shared by link or QR, with the confirmation questions you decide, for 29,99 EUR as a one-time payment. Change the time or the place afterwards and the same link shows the update.