What Are ‘Best Before’ Dates?

‘Best before’ dates feature on most food packaging. They indicate the timeframe in which each product should be consumed for peak taste, texture, and nutrient density. In contrast to ‘use by’ dates, which are featured on highly perishable foods and are designed for food safety, best before dates are simply guidelines for an optimal consumer experience.

By law, pre-packaged food must feature durability indications like best before dates and any necessary storage instructions. The UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) confirms that while use-by dates relate to food safety, best-before dates simply relate to quality.

However, many people continue to find the differences between sell-by, use-by, and best-before dates confusing. This results in wasted food. To avoid wasting food or consuming spoiled ingredients, some people say they simply use common sense, confirming with a visual and olfactory inspection whether something is good to eat or not.

Until relatively recently, this common sense approach was the only way to avoid spoiled food. Best before dates were launched to supermarket shelves by British retailer Marks & Spencer in the 1970s, after several years of use behind-the-scenes in stock rooms. While much of the industry maintains that best before dates are still helpful, anti-waste campaigners argue that they encourage people to throw out still-fresh foods and shop more.

Speaking to the BBC, Caitlin Shepherd of the campaign group This Is Rubbish, said that the main reason for best before dates is to protect retailers from potential litigation. "It's a symptom of our over-sanitized relationship with food," she added. “The best way to tell whether something is still fresh is by having a sniff, having a little taste.”

Food Waste And Best Before Dates

Confusion over food labeling and best before dates undeniably contributes to the growing global food waste problem. A 2021 survey found that less than half of US adults could describe what a “use by” label meant, even though the majority of people rely on them.

These results are borne out in other research, too. A 2023 report by the US’s Congressional Research Service found that labeling confusion causes at least seven percent of food waste. Since the US wastes 60 million tons of food annually (up to 40 percent of the total supply), labeling confusion causes approximately 4.2 million tons of food waste every year.

Globally, around 1.3 billion tons - one-third of all produced food - is lost or wasted per year, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The FAO estimates that this wasted food could feed around 1.26 billion food-insecure people.

This food waste also means that the water, land, labor, and billions of animal lives used in its production were wasted. And since most food waste ends up decomposing in landfills, where it produces the greenhouse gas (GHG) methane, the entire production-to-decomposition lifecycle of wasted food is extremely, unnecessarily high impact.

In fact, up to 10 percent of the planet’s total greenhouse gas equivalent (GHGe) emissions come from food waste. According to the environmental action NGO WRAP, if wasted food were a country, it would be the world’s largest GHG emitter after China and the US.

Solutions To Labeling-Related Food Waste

Since consumer confusion over best before dates is a key factor in food waste, there are several ways to promote a better understanding of these systems, including improving food education and standardizing labels industry-wide to make them more coherent.

In October, a new California law made it compulsory for producers to standardize the language on all food packaging sold within the state, per Retail Wire. If the law demonstrably reduces food waste, it’s possible that other states will introduce similar legislation, and companies forced to comply will simply update packaging across their entire ranges.

Speaking to the Washington Post, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s senior specialist Andrea Collins noted that some people are still “prematurely tossing food that could be really nourishing,” such as cereal and other long-lived staples. She described many best before dates as simply manufacturers’ “best guess at quality.”

Several companies are taking the initiative by updating labeling to reflect this. The yogurt brand Danone, which is a member of Too Good To Go’s “Look, Smell, Taste, Don’t Waste” campaign, has swapped ‘use by’ for ‘best before’ on its various dairy and nondairy products.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Asda, Morrisons, Marks & Spencer, and Waitrose have all scrapped best before dates on certain fresh fruit, veg, and milk products. Sainsbury’s has implemented similar measures, and swapped in text that reads “no date helps reduce waste.” Once again, the message is for consumers to decide for themselves if food is safe to eat or not.

Key Takeaways

While many people have become reliant on best before dates on food packaging, a lack of standardization, clarity, and consumer education around labeling is contributing to the problem of global food waste. Addressing these issues altogether will be critical in mitigating waste and all of the intersecting environmental and social issues.

As shown in California, legislative intervention may be the simplest way to ensure standardization and updated language when it comes to best before and use by dates.

While re-evaluating the necessity and impact of dates in food packaging can almost certainly help create a more sustainable food system, it’s important to note that around 13 percent of all food waste happens between harvest and retail, i.e. at a production level.

Encouraging the donation of surplus food to charities and local food banks can help to mitigate this. However, that model isn’t sustainable either, not without seriously reducing production, likely by incentivizing efficiency at both production and retail levels.

Greater Lincolnshire Food Partnership coordinator Laura Stratford told Circular Online that while everyone does have a responsibility to mitigate food waste, “lecturing individuals on wasting food” isn’t going to fix a model predicated on overproduction and overconsumption. 

Instead, the global food industry must be overhauled at every level, simultaneously, if food waste is to be effectively mitigated, with labeling making up just one small part of the whole.