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Here’s one simple way to cut your grocery bill: Stop throwing away so much food.
That may seem obvious, but you could actually be tossing perfectly good food without realizing it. If you’ve been following sell-by dates on labels in the name of food safety, you may be wasting a ton of food unnecessarily.
Each year, Americans waste $161 billion in food at the retail and consumer levels, a lot of it unnecessary, according to the US Food and Drug Administration.
How much are you wasting at home that you don’t have to?
What Do Sell-By Dates Really Mean?
A sell-by date tells stores how long to display a product for sale. It’s based on when a manufacturer believes food will be freshest.
Sell-by dates are just one kind of label manufacturers might use on your food, and none of them mean food will be unsafe to eat after the date, the USDA explains.
No federal regulations require companies to include date labels on food (with the exception of baby formula). For those companies that do, nothing regulates when those dates should be or what they actually mean.
Without a consistent system or actual safety guidelines, most of us don’t know what to make of any of it.
How to Decode Food Expiration Dates
Depending on the regulations in your state and the whims of certain manufacturers, food packages can display at least one of several labels used across the industry.
Those are:
- Sell-By Date: a month/date/year that tells a store how long to display the product for sale, based on freshness.
- Use-By Date: a month/date/year by which a manufacturer recommends you consume a product to ensure its peak quality. The label might also say “best if used by” or “best before.”
- Closed or Coded “Date:” a packing number the manufacturer uses to track a product in transport and in case of a recall. Stores often use these packing numbers to learn when a product was packaged and delivered to determine how long to keep it on the shelf.
- Expiration (EXP) Date:…
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