Thanks for this. In general I'm in favour of products removing the dates so that people don't chuck out perfectly good food based on superstition/misguided obed

Thanks for this. In general I'm in favour of products removing the dates so that people don't chuck out perfectly good food based on superstition/misguided obedience, but an annoying side-effect is that if we have two unopened packs of the same product it's hard to know which is older. By sheer bad luck, an old pack could hang around indefinitely and go off. I was thinking a possible solution would be a simple numerical counter (e.g. days since 1 Jan 2000), which can't be easily decoded by eye, but allowed you to rank items easily by age.