Worldwide Gluten-Free Certifications
What a menu label can't tell you — and the questions that actually determine whether a celiac traveler can eat safely.
A certification means someone other than the restaurant has inspected the kitchen. That’s it. It’s valuable, but it’s a narrower claim than most people hear. It says nothing about the food, it expires within a year, and in several countries the thing certified isn’t the thing you assumed.
Four Things Get Called Certification
Only one of them is.
An inspector visits, examines the kitchen, and passes it or doesn’t. Repeated annually. This is AIC in Italy, FACE in Spain, Coeliac Australia, and the Gluten-Free Food Program.
Staff take a course and the venue pledges to follow it. Nobody visits. Beyond Celiac’s GREAT Kitchens works this way. Useful, but it’s education, not verification.
A venue adds itself to a directory. Nobody checks. Some of these directories look official enough to pass for national registries, and they are the most common way a traveler gets misled.
The EU’s 20 ppm limit is a rule about packaging. It governs what can be printed on a packet. It certifies nothing, and it says nothing about a kitchen.
A certification means someone came and looked. Everything else is a promise.
Europe Agreed on a Number
Every national programme in Europe certifies to 20 parts per million. The figure comes from EU law, and before that from Codex Alimentarius, the international reference standard. It does not move.
Italy is not stricter than Germany. Spain is not stricter than Portugal. Comparing European countries on the threshold gets you nowhere, because there is nothing to compare.
What differs across Europe is enforcement — how many venues are in the registry, whether anyone visits them, how often, and whether hotels are covered at all. Italy has certified over four thousand venues and inspects them annually. Greece doesn’t certify restaurants. Same number, entirely different worlds.
The 20 ppm line wasn’t chosen because it’s a safe dose. It was chosen because it’s a measurable one.
The Rest of the World Didn’t
Leave Europe and the number itself starts moving — in both directions, and further than most travelers expect.
The logo you learned to trust at home tells you less the further you travel from it.
Europe
Italy — AIC / AFC
celiachia.it
The most developed foodservice programme in the world. Over 4,000 certified venues: restaurants, pizzerias, gelaterias, hotels, B&Bs, agriturismi. Annual on-site inspection. The AIC Mobile app sells short-term tourist access for a few euros and is the best tool of its kind anywhere.
Watch the scope. Certification for a hotel and certification for the restaurant inside a hotel are different things. Only one of them covers your breakfast.
Spain — FACE, and ACC in Catalonia
celiacos.org · celiacscatalunya.cat
Annual audit under the AOECS European Licensing System. Hotels are formally in scope. The FACEMOVIL app is free and it works.
Catalonia runs its own registry. A Barcelona venue may hold ACC certification rather than FACE. Both are legitimate; searching one will not find the other. And in practice, most Spanish hotels holding the badge hold it for the restaurant, not for breakfast.
Netherlands — NCV, “Lekker Glutenvrij”
glutenvrij.nl
The easiest certification in Europe to verify: a door sticker with the current year printed on it. Audited annually, unannounced. If the year is right, the certification is live.
Only around 55 independent venues nationwide hold it. Absence tells you nothing.
Portugal — APC
celiacos.org.pt
Same 20 ppm standard. The registry is thin, especially outside Lisbon. A venue’s absence from it means very little.
Germany — DZG
dzg-online.de
Much stronger on packaged products than on restaurants. The foodservice registry is limited.
France — AFDIAG
afdiag.fr
Product-focused. Restaurant coverage is minimal, which is worth knowing before assuming France works like Italy. It doesn’t.
United Kingdom — Coeliac UK
coeliac.org.uk
A venue accreditation scheme with a searchable directory and an app. One of the better foodservice registries outside Italy and Spain.
Belgium — VCV and SBC
coeliakie.be · sbc-asbl.be
Two societies, split by language: Flanders and Brussels-Wallonia. Both maintain gluten-free directories and guidance for the hospitality trade. Neither runs an audited restaurant certification.
Greece — Hellenic Coeliac Society (ELOKE)
hellenicceliac.gr
ELOKE does not certify restaurants. It’s an advocacy and product body. There is no Greek equivalent of the AIC registry, and a restaurant in Athens claiming national certification for its kitchen is claiming something that doesn’t exist.
Elsewhere in Europe
Ireland · Switzerland · Austria · Poland · Czechia · Croatia · Slovenia · The Nordics
All national members of AOECS, all working to 20 ppm. Registries are generally small and product-led. Finland is worth a note: it has among the highest rates of celiac disease anywhere, and a food culture that reflects it.
The Americas
United States — no national registry
Nothing equivalent to the AIC exists
The work is split three ways. Beyond Celiac runs a training programme. The Gluten Intolerance Group certifies packaged products through GFCO, at 10 ppm. And the National Celiac Association endorses the Gluten-Free Food Program — the only independently audited foodservice certification in the country, and at 5 ppm the strictest in the hemisphere.
Canada
celiac.ca · celiaquequebec.com
Both national societies endorse the Gluten-Free Food Program. Canadian regulation requires a gluten-free claim to account for cross-contact, not just ingredients — a stronger construction than the American rule.
Argentina — the state does it
ANMAT · Código Alimentario Argentino
Argentina runs a model that barely exists anywhere else: a legally mandatory gluten-free mark, at 10 ppm, stricter than Europe. Any product labelled gluten-free must be registered with the national regulator, and more than 23,000 products were on the register by 2023. The mark appears on ordinary supermarket items — rice, meat, tinned goods — not just on gluten-free substitutes.
And in 2023, the mark split in two. Sin TACC is now reserved for products that never contained wheat, oats, barley or rye. A new Sin Gluten mark covers products that originally contained gluten and had it removed by processing. Argentina has written the difference between never there and taken out into national law. Nowhere else has.
Brazil — the binary declaration
Lei nº 10.674 / 2003
Every packaged food in Brazil must state, on the label, that it either contains gluten or does not. The declaration is mandatory in both directions, and the law sets no threshold at all.
Which produces a strange and useful consequence: because there is no permitted quantity, a product carrying a cross-contact warning must be declared as containing gluten. Brazil has no 20 ppm allowance to hide in. On paper it is the strictest packaged-food regime in the world — and it says nothing whatever about restaurants.
Australia & New Zealand
Australia — Coeliac Australia Accreditation
coeliac.org.au
The most demanding foodservice programme anywhere. A venue must pass a full review of its practices, an on-site audit, and staff training — and then submit laboratory results on its own menu items, showing no detectable gluten. Accredited venues are the only ones permitted to display the Coeliac Australia symbol.
The first venue was accredited in 2017, so the registry is young and still small. But what’s in it has been tested, not merely inspected.
New Zealand — Dining Out Programme
coeliac.org.nz
Training first, then an independent on-site audit by an approved auditor, against the same no-detectable standard. Accredited venues display a window sticker and appear in the national dining directory.
One rule worth carrying into both countries: oats cannot be labelled gluten-free at all — not even certified, uncontaminated ones. Australia and New Zealand are the only places that have settled the oat question by law rather than leaving it to the individual.
Europe inspects the kitchen. Australia tests the food that came out of it.
Everywhere Else
Across most of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America outside Argentina and Brazil, there is no national gluten-free certification for restaurants. Not a weak one. None.
Certificates do sometimes appear in these regions, and they are worth reading carefully: they are often issued by tourism boards or standards agencies rather than celiac associations, and they may mention gluten among a long list of other things. That isn’t nothing, but it isn’t what the badge on an Italian door means either.
The working assumption for the rest of the world should be that no certification exists, and the kitchen has to be assessed directly. Which makes one thing a red flag rather than a credential: a property claiming national certification in a country that has no certifying body.
What a Certification Doesn’t Tell You
Whether the food is good. It’s a safety credential, not a recommendation. Confusing the two is how celiac travelers end up eating badly in great food cities.
Whether it’s still valid. All of these renew annually. A certification confirmed two years ago is not a certification now, and chef turnover is the usual reason a safe kitchen quietly stops being one.
Which kitchen it covers. Hotels certify the restaurant and not the breakfast, or the breakfast and not the restaurant. The badge on the door doesn’t say.
Whether anyone actually verified it. Self-registration directories exist in several countries. A venue lists itself, no one inspects, and the listing looks official enough to pass.
A certification is only real if it appears on the site of the body that issued it. Anywhere else, it’s a claim about a certification.
We check every certification against the body that issued it. Every property, every year.