Safe Seat at the Table
Professional food allergy and gluten-free staff training with an ANAB accredited AllerTrain® certificate of completion for the independent restaurant that cares for the needs of its community.
You already know which guests need extra care when they walk through your door. You've watched a guest scan your menu with that particular kind of anxiety, the one that means they're not sure if they can eat here safely. Maybe someone you love has celiac disease. Maybe you've had a guest get sick and it haunted you. You care about getting this right. You just haven't had the right training, the right tools, or the right support to do it with confidence.
Here's what changes when you do. A family of four with one celiac member who finds a restaurant they trust completely becomes a regular. At two visits a month, that's one table adding $3,600 or more to your revenue every year, before they tell anyone. And they will tell people. The food-allergy community shares safe restaurants the way foodies share hidden gems. One trusted recommendation in a celiac Facebook group or on FindMeGlutenFree can send you a wave of loyal, grateful guests who tip well and come back.
The training pays for itself the moment that first loyal family finds you.
Why not just do it online? A $15 course teaches your staff not to leave chicken out. It won't teach them how to handle the guest who mentions an allergy at the table. Safe Seat at the Table trains in person, by someone who lives with celiac disease and grew up in a family restaurant, and it leaves you with a system and a credential, not just a certificate.
Every engagement starts with a conversation about your restaurant: your menu, your kitchen, your team size. From there we build a training day, a Standard Operating Procedure, and a set of guest-facing materials made for your specific dishes and staff, not a generic template. Choose training, consulting, or both, and every price is custom quoted for what your restaurant actually needs.
Prefer both together? Training and consulting combine into a single seamless engagement: assessment and menu audit ahead of your training day, your whole team trained in one visit, and everything delivered as one custom quote.
Course and testing materials are billed per person, in addition to the engagement fee, and are available in English and Spanish. Please allow 4-6 weeks for full binder delivery after your training date.
Annie Toro Lopez is available for keynotes, panels, and educational sessions at food industry conferences, restaurant association events, tourism and hospitality gatherings, and community health forums.
With a background as a professional educator, two-time cookbook author, and someone who lives with celiac disease every day, Annie brings both the science and the personal story that moves audiences to action - not just awareness.
Annie holds the Certified AllerTrainer® (CAT) credential through MenuTrinfo’s ANAB-accredited AllerTrain® program.
Cats notice everything. So does she.
When Annie walks into a kitchen, she sees what others walk past every day: the cross-contact risk at the prep station, the gap in the allergy communication chain, the moment where a well-intentioned team member does not know what to say. Training with a CAT means your team learns from someone who has spent years watching, noticing, and caring.
Annie Toro Lopez lives with celiac disease, grew up in a family restaurant, and spent years as a professional educator whose middle school students achieved the number-one literacy scores in Aurora Public Schools. She brings all of that - the science, the kitchen experience, and the teacher's instinct - to every training she delivers.
She is a seed preservationist, small farmer, two-time cookbook author, and founder of the Denver Area Women's Network (DAWN). Her book Simply Gluten-Free: Real Ingredients for Everyday Life brings nearly 250 field-tested recipes to the celiac and gluten-free community. She holds the Certified AllerTrainer® (CAT) credential through MenuTrinfo's ANAB-accredited AllerTrain® program. Annie trains with care, lived experience, and a genuine stake in the outcome.
"Every guest deserves a seat at the table."
The AllerTrain® certificate of completion satisfies most current state mandates, including Illinois, Virginia, California, and Massachusetts. More states are moving in this direction - get ahead of it now.
When a traveler with celiac disease or a serious food allergy approaches your town, they are checking their apps to find a safe place to eat. If they can't find one, they'll keep driving, and your community just lost a meal, a tank of gas, a night's lodging, a stop at a local shop. I know because I've done it. I travel I-80 regularly, and I have driven past entire towns because I couldn't find a safe place to eat.
The food-allergy community is 85 million Americans strong. They travel, they research, they share safe destinations on dedicated apps, Facebook groups, and community forums. A single recommendation, "the restaurants in this town get it," can drive meaningful, recurring visitor traffic. A single bad experience gets shared just as fast.
Safe Seat at the Table gives your restaurant community the training, the tools, and the visible credential that puts your destination on that list. The return, in repeat visitors, in word-of-mouth traffic, in the spending that happens around a meal, starts with the first trained restaurant and compounds from there. Contact us for a custom program proposal for your community.
Start with a free 30-minute discovery call. No commitment - just a conversation about your restaurant, your team, and what training could look like for you.
Here is what happens when you reach out: