17 ms·

California bans sell-by dates

• lesuorac 2y ago
  > To adhere with the requisite language outlined, any food products with a date label — with the exception of infant formula, eggs, beer, and malt beverages — must state “Best if Used By” to indicate peak quality, and “Use By” to designate food safety. I mean, personally a big fan. I recently started seeing "Packed on <date>" and like wtf does that even mean. Was the corn also picked on that date? Like these dates have been on products for as long as I can remember. Might was well have some rules around them finally.
  • amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    For me the one exception would be coffee. I'd much rather see a "roasted" date than some "best if used by" date.
    • rising-sky 2y ago
      I don't think this law forbids producers from adding supplemental dates? So a coffee container could conceivably have both dates
    • kelipso 2y ago
      Same. I only buy the ones that have the roast date because most of the best if used by dates are around a year after the roast date. Cannot trust that.
    • ykonstant 2y ago
      Sorry for the juvenile joke, but I cannot help imagining an assembly worker picking up the bag, shouting "ur mom's FAT!" and stamping "roasted on Oct 7 2024" :D
    • ghaff 2y ago
      There’s frankly a huge variation between the OMG it was roasted two weeks ago and the OK it’s only been a few months crowd.
• justin_oaks 2y ago
  If I see a sell-by date, I only use it to compare between individual items. If there's a shelf with bread and two items have different sell-by dates, I choose the one with the later sell-by date.
  • iwontberude 2y ago
    I pick the older one to make sure the supply chain still works well.
    • lubujackson 2y ago
      User name checks out.
    • derekp7 2y ago
      In the case of buttermilk, it only starts to get a good flavor some time after the date on the carton. So I will often pick the oldest one (which is easy, be cause they put the older cartons toward the front).
      • Arch-TK 2y ago
        Similar rule seems to apply to avocados. They sell them as "ripe and ready" and a week later they're still too hard to crush.
    • akira2501 2y ago
      It's not incumbent on you to manage the supply chain. The people who are earning profits from servicing that chain have that responsibility. The entire system is best served if you operate with your _own_ best interests in mind.
      • iwontberude 2y ago
        I am smart enough to know that the food with expiration dates gets taken off the shelf and then some human being has to move it somewhere else if I don't take it. How does that not serve the system? I like being efficient and filling in gaps where it doesn't matter. Freshness differentials on shelves isn't worth it for me or the business.
• delichon 2y ago
  I wonder, do sell-by dates harm the bottom line of groceries due to more unsold perishable goods, or does that cost get passed back to the vendors? Either way this rule would seem to be advantageous to either the retailer or the wholesaler. Perhaps that helped to get it passed.
  • Pat_Murph 2y ago
    When I worked in a grocerie store. The bread guy took back the unsold breads and we were only charged for the sold ones and credited the unsold. This was in Montréal 20 years ago. Not sure how it is today and I have no idea in California. But since it passed I'm guessing it was thr same and now this would be an obvious advantage for the sellers since this would assuré they sell everything.
  • kaikai 2y ago
    I worked in a grocery coop and it depended on the vendor. For some, they controlled how much stock we carried and would take back anything that didn’t sell. For things that we ordered directly and chose how much to carry, we were responsible for expired food costs.
    • 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
      This is something I have idly wondered. Where does the expired food go? Both “literally rotting” and “canned good safe for a decade, but we toss it after 12 months”. Landfill? Animal feed? Some amount of charity for the salvageable items? A typical grocery store could produce an incredible amount of daily waste.
      • AngryData 2y ago
        It isnt uncommon for pig farmers to buy bulked spoiled or old food. I don't know how much that represents overall though.
      • BenjiWiebe 2y ago
        When I volunteered at a soup kitchen in Newfoundland, we got in just/nearly expired food fairly regularly. Some got used, some (fresh stuff) got frozen, some got tossed. Definitely a large amount of it went to perfectly fine meals. The cook was very skilled at making good meals with an odd selection of ingredients.
• coding123 2y ago
  Yet another surprise. I wish CA lawmakers would stop operating in the dark.
• LeFantome 2y ago
  This all makes massive sense to me. The people in my life treat any date on food as an expiry date and throw out massive amounts of perfectly edible food. Also, people do not seem to have any concept about the rate at which different food products spoil. Some things can be used way past the dates I see. Others really are going off by then.
  • doublerabbit 2y ago
    Meanwhile we have gotten rid of expiry dates here in the UK. And I have bought fruits and vegetables that all look fine on the outside but inside are rotten. Not only frustrating this then wastes my time and my money. Items do need expiry dates, sugar does not, fresh produce and vegetables do. However, educating that your food isn't instantly bad when it's gone pass would encourage people to waste less food.
    • toomuchtodo 2y ago
      It feels like the solution to this is some sort of in app mechanism to be able to submit evidence back to the grocer that the produce or other perishable was not in condition to be sold, and for them to credit your account accordingly. This saves you a trip back to the store. If they’re selling perishables that have already gone bad, certainly, that sounds like a supply chain failure if they’re offering that for sale which should be going right into the compost waste stream.
      • doublerabbit 2y ago
        Save's a trip sure, but I'm out of a meal for the day. I make dinner on a day by day basis. What I mean is that I stop at the supermarket on the way home, buy what I need and then make dinner rather than stocking the ingredients. I find this method for me a good way to get out of the work mantra. Knowing I can make dinner and then drink to it with a glass of wine. So to get home, find out that X vegetable has expired now means I have to find time to take it to the store or throw it out and waste my money nor have the ability to make what I planned. If you order online, you can request a refund without much hassle but I don't do that.
• elzbardico 2y ago
  In Brazil products are marked with two dates: - Manufactured/Packaged by. - Valid until. The valid until is related to food safety and is regulated by the federal sanitary authority for each product by a federal standard. The "freshest by" is something that consumers have to infer by themselves probably as a midpoint between those two dates.
  • bombcar 2y ago
    Packaged/Manufactured date is the way to go; you can then even have "valid until" be implicit on most goods (that don't expire) and only physically labelled on things that go bad, like raw meat or vegetables.
• bko 2y ago
  You know who hates food waste more than Gavin Newsom? Every greedy supermarket market executive that throws away 30% of their inventory. Especially when their profit margins are often in the low single digits. The article says there is no mandates on any types of dates. So I imagine these dates serve some purpose, otherwise they wouldn't be there. Laws like this often sound like they're helping but since no one is forcing the hand of retailers, so I would be they end up increasing costs. Maybe not food waste per-se, but some costs that originally tipped the retailers to have these dates in the first place.
  • ihumanable 2y ago
    Seems like the food producer would have a clear incentive to mark their products with sell by dates. If I’m making a food product for sale at retail and I can mark it “sell by” some date, consumers get confused and think it’s no good after that date, the store that buys my food product will not want to keep it on the shelf because consumers won’t buy it. The retailer has to discard the perfectly fine item and reorder from… me the food product producer and then I make more money. I imagine the food retailers are happy about this and the food manufacturers are probably unhappy.
    • bko 2y ago
      I think you can come up with a lot of scenarios in which any one person is happy or not happy. But in complicated systems, it's impossible to know exactly and you have to rely on market forces to work these things out. The problem is people coming in without any humility and trying to tinker with the system and getting shocked when there is unexpected consequences.
  • ntlk 2y ago
    Not sure whether it was the removal of best before dates or Brexit, but fresh food and veg in Britain is often already rotting in supermarkets. So now instead of the store throwing out loads of produce past its best, I have to do it when I get home and realise that yet again one in each pack of 3 onions is rotted.
    • 2y ago
• hnpolicestate 2y ago
  I wonder, if someone purchases and eats a spoiled food item that would have had a sell by date before the ban, will they have legal standing to sue the state? I assume this is different than expiration date?
  • brudgers 2y ago
    If you seek an informed opinion, ask your lawyer.
• JohnFen 2y ago
  Let's hope this catches on elsewhere!
  • bigstrat2003 2y ago
    It likely will. Unfortunately, California laws tend to be de facto national laws for consumer goods, because manufacturers don't want to make one version for Cali and one for the rest of the US.
    • Dalewyn 2y ago
      WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. Meanwhile in Maine, you're questioning the sanity of Californians.
• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Why ban such dates? I would want this data if I am a consumer. Sure the food may not be expired yet, but it may go bad sooner. I don’t understand why California feels the need to continuously pass hundreds of bills and impose so much control.
  • add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    > Why ban such dates? They're not being banned. The wording must change to "best if used by" if it's not about food safety.
• tivert 2y ago
  > To adhere with the requisite language outlined, any food products with a date label — with the exception of infant formula, eggs, beer, and malt beverages — must state “Best if Used By” to indicate peak quality, and “Use By” to designate food safety. "Use by" is dumb, it's too close to "Best if Used By." If there's a safety issue, the term should be "expires", "expires on", or something like that.
  • brightball 2y ago
    I remember seeing a sell by date on salt. It was at that moment that I started questioning the process.
    • etrautmann 2y ago
      As another poster mentioned, it likely refers to the packaging - either degredation of materials used or the effect that has on the contents (moisture ingress, oxidation, etc). For salt, that seems somewhat silly, but not enough to make me fundamentally distrust the rationale
      • nick3443 2y ago
        Sell by is entirely unrelated to quality though. It's just how often they think they can get away with. Like the recommendation on a box of baking soda... Put it in your fridge and change it every 30 days. No thanks.
        • ricardobeat 2y ago
          Pretty sure that’s the recommendation to deodorize your fridge, not related to the baking soda’s shelf life. The other side of the box says “keep in a cool and dark place”. It does seem to go “flat” after a few months regardless, even when the expiry date is 2 years in the future.
          • MrDarcy 2y ago
            There’s a whole controversy over this specific issue. For decades they recommended 90 days in the fridge to keep it fresh. Then they switched to 30 days recommendation to goose sales.
• hentrep 2y ago
  Here’s the actual USDA article describing the difference between “sell by, “use by”, and “best by” terms: http://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and-preparation/food-safety-basics/food-product-dating http://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and-... I don’t have time to find a source that supports this, but I understand that these dates also refer to the durability of the “food safe” container/packaging. Ever drink water from an unopened plastic bottle that has been stored for awhile? That taste is not from the water decaying or otherwise breaking down.
  • guelo 2y ago
    Those cheap plastic water bottles should be banned. They’re one of the greatest sources of micro plastics in our bodies. (Not to mention unstudied nano plastics)
    • lupusreal 2y ago
      They can't be anywhere even close to synthetic textiles.
      • debit-freak 2y ago
        Presumably you're not chewing on or eating from synthetic textiles. Meanwhile an enormous amount of food is shipped in, and even cooked in, plastic directly. Of course you're right in the sense that when it comes to our general environment textiles produce far more environmental microplastics than most other sources. Particularly in our water systems.
        • relaxing 2y ago
          …water systems that supply our drinking water.
        • lupusreal 2y ago
          I think synthetic fabrics shed very small particles into the air every time they are disturbed, eventually wearing out entirely. We breath a lot of that in. Clothes, furniture, sometimes even bed sheets; these all shed fibers into our living spaces.
• SoftTalker 2y ago
  I don't pay dates much mind. If it looks good, smells good, and tastes good I eat it. We are pretty adept at smelling and tasting spoiled food.
  • bombcar 2y ago
    The real danger is leeching packaging materials, which is pretty minor.
  • causal 2y ago
    Botulism can be present without any smell or taste
    • SoftTalker 2y ago
      Pretty low risk though. It requires a low-oxygen environment so mainly canned foods are the risk and overwhelmingly home-canned food that isn't heated properly/long enough. But yeah, don't eat food from damaged cans.
    • anon291 2y ago
      Botulism is a concern with canned food which have no real sell by date. Moreover, if botulism was in there during canning it's there on day one and day 1000.
  • Lev1a 2y ago
    Over the last few years here in Germany many, many food products have gained a little note next to the "MHD" (Mindesthaltbarkeitsdatum, [1]) which says something like "oft länger gut" ("often viable for longer") or "ansehen, riechen, probieren" ("Look, smell, try"). And IIRC the EU is also debating the removal of MHD from staple foods that are shelf-stable for years, like dried pasta, uncooked rice etc. Normal sugar already doesn't have an MHD, although jam sugar is marked with the year of manufacture since they have other compounds in them as well beside the sugar itself. Where i work all all the food that's simply past its MHD gets collected every morning by the Red Cross for food banks ("Die Tafel"). Obviously if a foods container is damaged or it's rotted fruits/veg or it would be unsafe to consume for another reason [2], that stuff gets thrown out (into bins collected for biomass processing). [1]: pretty sure it's the same as "best (if used) by date" since products from abroad are sometimes marked "BBD <date>" instead of "MHD <date>" (at least on the transport packaging). [2]: like lazy customers not putting frozen or cooled foods back but leaving them elsewhere in the warm store, something which REALLY aggravates me.
• sdo72 2y ago
  I find food in the US contains too much toxin that harms the body. They have a lot of synthetic chemicals and preservatives. Many of which have very bad long term damages to the body. Even with these labels, sometimes it doesn't really tell the whole story about the ingredients. Most of the food that sits on the shelf for weeks shouldn't be consumed.
  • vel0city 2y ago
    > Most of the food that sits on the shelf for weeks shouldn't be consumed. Salt? Flour? Oil? Oats? Rice? Garlic? Black pepper? Most ground spices? Nuts? Beans? Honey? Vinegar? Quinoa? All of these can reasonably sit on a shelf for weeks. I guess none of these are safe to be consumed, all just "toxins".
    • sdo72 2y ago
      That isn't most, and I mentioned synthetic chemicals & preservatives.
      • vel0city 2y ago
        Pretty much all oils are processed foods. Vinegar is a preservative and is a processed food. Most salts are processed and are common preservatives. Flour is a processed food. The reasons why Twinkies are so shelf stable are largely the same reasons why flour or rice or olive oil is shelf stable. Better be careful of those chemicals like sodium chloride and dihydrogen monoxide.
        • sdo72 2y ago
          > Salt? Flour? Oil? Oats? Rice? Garlic? Black pepper? Most ground spices? Nuts? Beans? Honey? Vinegar? Quinoa? Sure, if you are assuming Americans are mostly eating these things daily.
          • vel0city 2y ago
            Twinkies are made up almost entirely (by mass) of the things listed above. The only major thing missing is sugar.
• torgoguys 2y ago
  > To adhere with the requisite language outlined, any food products with a date label — with the exception of infant formula, eggs, beer, and malt beverages — must state “Best if Used By” to indicate peak quality, and “Use By” to designate food safety. Infant formula is required federally, so OK. Eggs are an oddly specific one, but I guess I can see it (although I'd wonder why some other products like milk, or meat might not be similarly required). But why beer??? Legit question--I don't drink so maybe it's obvious and I'm just a knucklehead.
  • mikro2nd 2y ago
    Beer certainly is an odd one! Some (craft) craft beers will age gracefully -- improving, even -- for years. Industrial lagers... not so much. I scored once with an imported (Belgian) craft beer at the local supermarket, heavily marked down price because the sell-by date was approaching. Some days later, marked down by half again because the date had passed. Needless to say, I bought all I could carry.
    • crowcroft 2y ago
      This is a tricky one, because at some point you need to think about the integrity of the product's packaging, and how well it's been stored. Craft beer *in a can* will not age gracefully. Even in a bottle, while it will probably be fine, how much light exposure are the bottle getting, have they been left out in the sun at any point etc. Best before dates, hard expiry dates (if required), and ideally including a packaged on date would be a pretty ideal amount of information.
      • psunavy03 2y ago
        It depends on the beer type as well. Malty strong beers age well. Hoppy beers don't because the compounds are volatile. Malty beers benefit in flavor from continued breakdown of their chemical compounds, hoppy beers don't.
        • _JamesA_ 2y ago
• shtopointo 2y ago
  Won't the producers just leave the same date in, but change the wording before it?
  • teraflop 2y ago
    That's the goal -- to make the wording clearer. As the article says, many people misunderstand "sell by" to mean "only safe if used by".
• ryukoposting 2y ago
  When my wife and I moved in together, we had a spat about what "sell by" dates actually meant. She had been throwing away loads of perfectly good food because she misunderstood the meaning of the sell-by date. I don't remember who taught me what they actually mean, but I was able to point her to a USDA site that showed the actual meaning. I'm pretty sure that was the only time I have ever been right when she and I disagreed about something kitchen-related, by the way. I think the ban makes sense when you consider that CA still has a provision for a "best by" date. Some more education is still necessary, though. Certain foods can go months or years past their "best by" date and still be perfectly safe - even if they might taste a little funky.
  • jessriedel 2y ago
    > Some more education is still necessary, though. Certain foods can go months or years past their "best by" date and still be perfectly safe - even if they might taste a little funky. Aren’t safety restrictions the “use by” date? > Switching to language that either says “Best if Used By” or “Use By” will also help minimize ambiguity. The former will establish consistent wording for advising when an item is less fresh (but still okay to eat), while the latter designates food that should no longer be consumed due to safety concerns.
    • ryukoposting 2y ago
      > Aren’t safety restrictions the “use by” date? Exactly - people haven't been taught to actually look at the words before the date. They just look at the date, say "oh that was yesterday" and throw stuff away. I guess I didn't make that perfectly clear in the parent comment - my wife didn't know that the difference in wording mattered, so she just ignored it.
  • sandworm101 2y ago
    There is also much confusion about how food actually goes bad. There are some foods that absolutely should be avoided after a specific amount of time. But most will go bad somewhat randomly, mostly after but often before their sell/best by dates. Sometimes a jug of milk will be bad before it even arrives at a store. Sometimes mold will appear on fresh bread very suddenly. Food is more complicated than fixed dates. I was buying eggs recently when I, as my mother taught me, opened the case and checked to see if any had cracked. The person beside me said "I hope you are buying those" as if me touching them somehow made them unsellable. People need to learn more about food.
• ggreer 2y ago
  This article claims that 12 million tons of food are wasted in California annually, and that this law will save 70,000 tons of food from going to waste. California's population is 39 million. Does that mean that every Californian is wasting a pound of food every day? That seems suspiciously high to me. I'm curious how they came up with those numbers. I think this law is like plastic straw bans, or mandated bag fees, or prop 65 cancer warnings: a feel-good law that causes more problems than it solves. Anyone who makes food for sale in California will have to redo their labelling (or at least pay people to audit their product labelling). These costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of increased prices. Some manufacturers will choose to not sell in California, reducing consumer choice, reducing competition, and increasing prices. And for what? To reduce food waste by 0.6% in the best case. It seems to me that the problem with food wastage isn't the extra food, it's the externalities created by food production, distribution, and disposal. It would be much more effective to tax these externalities than to make ineffective laws about product labelling.
  • rsynnott 2y ago
    > Does that mean that every Californian is wasting a pound of food every day? That seems suspiciously high to me. That seems plausible. Figures vary a bit, but generally you're looking at 20-30% of food in supermarkets ultimately being wasted. An average person eats something like 1.5kg a day, so a pound seems about right. (Of course it's not as simple as that, because there's also wastage at home, and that's very hard to measure.) That said, there's also a lot of wastage by restaurants and other catering operations, and this won't really help there, so the impact may not be as great as people hope.
  • akira2501 2y ago
    My suspicion is that most of the waste is from the commercial sector and not from the residential. Even to the extent that it is just make food garbage separate from other garbage and then compost it directly. There's no reason to see discarded food as "wasted" other than for the fact our processes for managing the obvious consequence of home kitchens are either incomplete or totally missing.
  • anon84873628 2y ago
• paxys 2y ago
  No date printed on a food item is ever going to be accurate to the day. Unless something is wildly out of date, just use your senses. If it looks, smells and feels fine, it is fine. You’d be surprised by how much longer everything in your friend (and outside) can last.
• gandalfian 2y ago
  <must state “Best if Used By” to indicate peak quality, and “Use By” to designate food safety.> This sounds perfectly sensible and uncontroversial?
  • devonbleak 2y ago
    From a consumer standpoint, yes. From a company-who-abuses-best-by-dates-to-sell-more-product standpoint it's very controversial.
    • spease 2y ago
      They would already just put “best by” on the product, so it’s not making things any worse that I can see.
  • ensignavenger 2y ago
    It seems to me like a quibe about verbage. I suppose "sell by" could be interpreted as a supplier telling a store what to do with their own goods. But on the other hand, the supplier has a brand on those goods and has a significant interest in protecting the brand.
  • ninalanyon 2y ago
    That's how it has been here in Norway for years. And recently producers have started adding phrases like "ofte gode etter", "and often good after" together with See, Smell, Taste. There will typically only be one date and it will have text specifying whether it is "Best Before End" for things that simply decline in quality such as milk and vegetables and "Use By" for things that go bad in ways that will be harmful such as meat.
  • 404mm 2y ago
    I’d prefer just one date: “Use By”. If something is still safe to eat but doesn’t taste great anymore, then that’s past the Use By mark for me.
    • heavensteeth 2y ago
• tiffanyh 2y ago
  Montana uses Sell-By dates to artificially ban out-of-state milk. They want to promote in-state business (dairy farmers). Montana purposefully has short Sell-by diary dates, because it makes it prohibitive for an out-of-state dairy to transport their milk into Montana. https://www.nrdc.org/bio/dana-gunders/how-montanas-sell-date-sends-good-milk-down-drain https://www.nrdc.org/bio/dana-gunders/how-montanas-sell-date...
  • anigbrowl 2y ago
    I hate this kind of mendacity. Wanting to protect their dairy industry is understandable, but perpetuating a fraud upon consumers is not the way to do it.
    • seanw444 2y ago
      If you can't beat the competition, change the rules.
    • lupire 2y ago
      It's not a fraud. It's a higher standard of quality, that is protectionist and arguably unnecessary and wasteful.
      • EasyMark 2y ago
        I think they mean fraud in the classical use of the word rather than a strict legal statute meaning. m-w.com an act of deceiving or misrepresenting
      • lupusreal 2y ago
        Unnecessary and wasteful is a good way to describe shipping out of state milk into a state that has so many cows of their own. Do you think those trucks all run on pixie farts?
  • karlzt 2y ago
    >> Sell-by diary dates dairy
• dfilppi 2y ago
  [dead]
• hbarka 2y ago
  The headline would be better served if it said something to the effect that sell-by dates will be replaced with another date suggestion. Instead they chose this misleading headline. The whole thing is also a great example of politics pretending to advocate for the consumer. It’s really a ploy to keep the product sellable for as long as possible. Who gets to decide what best-by date means? If you really want to serve the customer put a made-on date and let me decide if this one-year old can of tomatoes is really something I want to use by day 366. Now, we’re still at a race to the bottom by a combination of gaming the best-by date and putting preservatives to the maximum allowable extent possible. Packaged food industry.
• Thuggery 2y ago
  Sensible change. But I wonder if it will encourage retailers to treat the secondary now more food safety related "use by" date as the real "best if used by" date. If you're like me and slightly paranoid about food expiration dates and sometimes checks things in corner stores, you might notice they like to sell items that can be razor thin on the "sell by" date.
  • anon84873628 2y ago
    That's exactly the problem attempting to be solved. There should be no problem with a retailer selling a product up to the sell by date, but you are still not keen to buy it because we don't know how much longer after that we have. Instead you will be able to decide how close you want to cut it to either date.
• kjhughes 2y ago
  A requirement that the "best by" or "use by" date be clearly visible would also help. I've spent way too much time spinning packages scanning for any date, sometimes having to give up, sometimes having to whip out my phone's camera to try to discern tiny black print on dark blue background, in small font, partly malformed, ...
• lgleason 2y ago
  I'm glad I don't live in California. How are you supposed to know if you have milk that will quickly go bad etc.? While some of this can cause waste, many food items do start to go bad after they sit on the shelves too long. That said I'm sure the people behind this would prefer that you don't buy dairy and that you pick the mold off your bread and eat the rest. Thanks, but no thanks.
  • jamiek88 2y ago
    From the first paragraph: “must state “Best if Used By” to indicate peak quality, and “Use By” to designate food safety”
  • snozolli 2y ago
    How are you supposed to know if you have milk that will quickly go bad etc.? From the article: any food products with a date label — with the exception of infant formula, eggs, beer, and malt beverages — must state “Best if Used By” to indicate peak quality, and “Use By” to designate food safety.
  • ottumm 2y ago
    The beginning of the article should put your mind at ease: > To adhere with the requisite language outlined, any food products with a date label — with the exception of infant formula, eggs, beer, and malt beverages — must state “Best if Used By” to indicate peak quality, and “Use By” to designate food safety.
  • rolph 2y ago
    date of manufacture, or date of processing is far more practical to the consumer
  • a13o 2y ago
    > How are you supposed to know if you have milk that will quickly go bad etc.? The milk will say "Best if Used By <date>". This information can be found in the fifth sentence in the article.
• nikolay 2y ago
  Many foods are unregulated. It's strange that milk, for example, doesn't have any requirements for its expiration date. One brand widened their "best buy" date and I noticed their milk was souring 3 days before the "best buy" date. After contacting them several times, I told them that they gave me no option but to escalate this to authorities, they didn't seem concerned a bit, and after doing my research, I found out that they can put anything on the label without repercussions. The manufacturer even recommended the record stupid stuff like using the milk in smoothies and other odor and taste masking means to make it "best." So, even "best buy" for foods that can make you sick is meaningless!
  • TrueSlacker0 2y ago
    All the grocery stores in my area will full refund the purchase if it goes bad before the best by date. By returning it to the store you purchased it from, it gets marked as a defective return. When that rate hits a certain percentage they will stop carrying the product.
    • nikolay 2y ago
      I think that's why they made this gimmick, because they had a lot of unsold milk. People buy their milk by half gallon as smaller packaging is extremely expensive. They have a pretty stupid policy - instead of having honest and reciprocal pricing, they make only 1/2-gallon best-price per volume, which leads to lots of unsold milk as who would be such big quantity a couple of days before expiration when it's probably already soured and unsuitable as fluid milk. And I suggested all these ina very friendly manner, but they didn't change. So, I switched to a more honest product, plus, I'd rather not us have raw milk when the bird flu is gaining grounds pretty quickly.
  • ninalanyon 2y ago
    > It's strange that milk, for example, doesn't have any requirements for its expiration date. Why should it? It won't do you any harm. Just don't buy from suppliers who lie to you. But surely if it went sour before the Best before Date then the supplier has supplied goods that were not of merchantable quality and not in accordance with the implied contract and has failed to uphold their side of the contract. But surely your complaint should be directed against the shop that sold it to you? I would expect the shop to either refund or replace the goods.
• zargon 2y ago
  I prefer "packed on" dates. With "best by" dates you have no idea what the actual age of the product is. Either for comparing freshness when buying it or for deciding whether to consume it later.
  • slenk 2y ago
    Food can sit around before being packed. I don't think packed on is any more useful in 99% of situations
    • zargon 2y ago
      The "best by" period is arbitrary, so a packed on date removes ambiguity that varies from producer to producer.
      • anon84873628 2y ago
        Why is the "best by" period arbitrary? That is based on an interval after the actual production time. "Packed on" only helps if you have some understanding of how long that product will stay good for.
• dang 2y ago
  Recent and related: California first state to ban 'sell by' 'best before' label to reduce food waste - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41775298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41775298 - Oct 2024 (61 comments)
• s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I think it's wild how much misinformation and confusion there is about this minor change. I blame this on the legislature trying to hype up their nothing law into some major achievement, and news agencies shamelessly trying to make a story out of it. The law is simply that you cant use various labels like "enjoy by" or "Best by" and instead, all non-safety dates must use the exact words "best if used by". It wont reduce food waste by 20% as claimed. 82001. (a) On and after January 1, 2025, a food manufacturer, processor, or retailer responsible for the labeling of food items for human consumption that chooses, or is otherwise required by law, to display a date label to communicate a quality or safety date on a food item manufactured on or after January 1, 2025, shall use one of the following uniform terms on the date label: (1) “BEST if Used by” or “BEST if Used or Frozen by” to indicate the quality date of the food item. (2) “USE by” or “USE by or Freeze by” to indicate the safety date of the food item. (3) “BB” to indicate the quality date of the food item if the food item is too small to include the uniform term described in paragraph (1). (4) “UB” to indicate the safety date of the food item if the food item is too small to include the uniform term described in paragraph (2). https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB660/id/2837671 https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB660/id/2837671
• sharpshadow 2y ago
  Europe has the MHD (Mindesthaltbarkeitsdatum)[0] but I think I never saw it exceeding 2 years which for some products is misleading since they would be good for very much longer like seeds or marmalade for example. It will probably help to prolong certain products shelf life but it isn’t a perfect system. 0. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindesthaltbarkeitsdatum https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindesthaltbarkeitsdatum
  • rendx 2y ago
    > which for some products is misleading since they would be good for very much longer The Mindeshaltbarkeitsdatum is exactly what it says: a "best before" (MINDEST, minimum). It does not say anything about it not potentially remaining the same quality or taste after this date, and definitely not that it is dangerous to consume after. It may for example simply lose some of its taste over time, but up until that date it is "guaranteed" to taste the same ("the best"). Products that should not be consumed after a certain date (like meat) use "Zu verbrauchen bis" (use before); that is not a MHD.
• mensetmanusman 2y ago
  I realized food waste was a good thing during Covid. We had a 50% buffer on food supply during a global crisis. Had we been ultra efficient we would have been experiencing mass starvation due to the lack of automation in many parts of the local supply chains.
• shikon7 2y ago
  This was introduced a few years ago in the Swiss retailer chain Migros. The span between the sell-by date and the use-by date (typically around 1/10-1/5 of the entire lifespan of the product) would give the consumer the safety that the product was usable for a few days without checking the dates. Without it, you need to check the date of every perishable product you buy if you want to consume it even the next day. If the store forgot to remove the product for a day (which happens regularly), you would buy a potentially harmful product if you don't always check the date. On the positive side, the food can be sold regularly just until its expiry date, preventing food waste.
• Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
  I had a friend who always said "Best-before doesn't mean bad-after"