Starting this week, grocery shoppers in California will start noticing a major change on the shelves – food products in the U.S. state will no longer have a “sell-by” date.
That’s because a new law, California Assembly Bill 660, went into effect on Wednesday, prohibiting the use of “sell-by” dates on food packets in an effort to reduce food waste.
These food labels are a “source of consumer confusion that results in the disposal of wholesome, nutritious food,” the California Department of Food and Agriculture said.
The department estimates that nearly 2.5 billion meals worth of unspoiled food is thrown away each year, contributing to the organic waste that is 48 per cent of what Californians send to landfills.
Many consumers use sell-by and expiration dates interchangeably, leading to them throwing away perfectly safe food, said University of Guelph food economist Mike von Massow.
“Consumers, if they see a date on their food product, they assume that’s an expiration date,” he said.
“The sell-by date is a guideline to say this is when this should be off the shelf at a grocery store. It doesn’t mean that this is when it’s not good anymore. It doesn’t mean it’s not safe anymore. It just means from a freshness perspective, that’s the date that they suggest something gets sold by,” he added.
While Canada typically does not have “sell-by” dates on food products, Canadians are more accustomed to seeing “best before” dates on packaging.
The “best before” date is also not an expiration date, he said.
“It is a measure of the time until which a product is at its peak in terms of quality, not safety,” von Massow said.
Confusion over what labels mean accounts for $12 billion worth of avoidable food waste a year, or 23 per cent of all food waste in Canada, according to food rescue organization Second Harvest.
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“I love what they did (in California),” said Second Harvest CEO Lori Nikkel.
“Most countries have a ‘best before’ date and a ‘use by’ date. Even if we just did that, there would be less confusion. ‘Best before’ means peak freshness, ‘used by’ means safety,” she added.
California’s law requires food producers to make their dates clear.
Food manufacturers are now required to have ‘quality dates’ such as ‘best if used by’ or ‘best if frozen by’ separate from ‘safety dates’ such as ‘use by’ or ‘freeze by.’
A very small range of products, such as baby formula, have a “regulated date” in Canada, von Massow said.
“In that case, there are rules around requiring a date and how that date is set,” he said, adding that in most cases, the “best before” date is up to the individual food producers.
In some cases, producers may try to shorten their best before timeline to make sure their reputation for quality and freshness is maintained, he said, in other cases producers may be accused of shortening dates to make sure you feel pressure to throw it out and buy the product again.
“I don’t know that there’s any evidence for that, but there’s some pretty clear evidence that the use of these dates is incorrect and that it increases food waste,” he said.
Having “best before” dates on food packets caught on in Canada in the 1970s, Nikkel said, but it was meant as a marker to manage inventory at the back end, not indicate anything to customers, she said.
“It was (about) how to rotate the stock. It wasn’t in front of customers,” she said. “The pendulum swung way too far the other way, and we have to bring it back.”
Nearly half (46.5 per cent) of all edible food in Canada is thrown out every year, according to Second Harvest, while one in four Canadians don’t know where their next meal is coming from.
In 2023, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food sought to address the waste caused by confusion over food labels.
The committee urged the federal government in a June 2023 report to look at whether eliminating “best before” dates would reduce food waste in Canada.
In her testimony before the standing committee, Nikkel said the dates are “wildly misunderstood,” adding that they are not expiry dates but refer to a product’s “peak freshness” and eliminating best before dates would prevent safe, consumable food from being thrown away.
In the three years since that report, however, momentum has stalled on the issue, she said.
“For millennia, there was no such thing as the best before date and people were eating the food because they understood what food meant. I think part of it is we’re just so disconnected from food,” she said.
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