Disney Cruises with food allergies

As the parent of a child with food allergies, we are often nervous traveling out of our home area, where we know the locations of the nearest hospitals, grocery stores with allergen-free foods, and maybe even a few restaurants that cater to food allergies. Imagine getting on a ship and traveling out to sea for days. That can be really intimidating.

Disney World and Disneyland are the gold standard for food allergy handling. But what about Disney Cruise Lines? Do they have the same options and experience? Yes, they do, but it takes a bit more planning. In fact, the Special Diets program for Disney Cruise Lines was created by the same guy, Chef Joel Schaefer, who created the program for Disney World. Unfortunately, it’s even more difficult to get details for the DCL program than it is for Disney World. Therefore, since we don’t have any first-hand experience, we found someone who did!

Jennifer is from Canada and has been on many cruises with her food allergies, both Disney and other cruise lines, with a variety of experiences. She tells us that DCL is the best, by far. Read her fabulous Disney Cruise food allergy tips here. She collected them over time for DCL just as we have for Disney World.

We found Jennifer thanks to another reader and Twitter friend, Jenni Hilton, who tweets for Food Allergy Kids Atlanta and herself. She mentioned, on Twitter, that she was taking a cruise on the Disney Dream. So, we reached out to her and asked her to tell us about her experience once she returned. However, she also posted the question on the Allergic Living Talking Allergies forum, and received an extensive response from Jennifer. We asked Jennifer to provide a few tips for our website, and she delivered a very detailed list of procedures, tips and first-hand experience for taking a Disney Cruise with food allergies.

Thank you, Jenni and Jennifer!

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