I hate it when someone gives you a box of chocolates or something, and you crack it open only to find that it's all covered in that white stuff - that tells you some of the fat has leeched out of the chocolate - and it's not very nice!!!

ewww, I hear ya, GSK.

there's a similar code for eggs.

just looked at an egg carton.. 1 digit for the year, followed by a 2 digit code for the week (01-52).

Some candy really could "expire" though, if it has nuts or other ingredients which can certainly spoil. Even with the preservatives, I ain't eating four year old candy.

I wish every packaged food would print "best before" dates on the packaging. I'm neurotic about not eating expired food and I've called many an 800 number asking how to decipher their stupid manufacturing codes. If nutritional info is required, why not shelf life info? For many products that's just as important.

good info!

but... why don't they just print easy to read expirations like everyone else? why this code system? are we spies?

@chicagojohn: I remember my mom buying a brand of eggs that had their use by date stamped right on each individual egg, which seemed pretty smart to me - since a lot of people remove eggs from the carton if their fridge has an egg cup section.

I prefer all the fat to leech into me.@gskelding:

@gskelding:
Chocolate "bloom" (the grey/white coating you sometimes see) is caused by improper storage, not age. While its not particularly appetizing, it really doesn't affect the taste.

I'm with you, though. I'd prefer to avoid it.

@spryte:

In the UK and Switzerland (havn't lived/bought eggs elsewhere), every egg I've bought had a date stamp on it.

You can also figure out which candy is old based on the promotional marketing graphics. Like the other day I saw graphics promoting "Pirates of the Caribbean" on some chocolate bar and instantly knew that had to be seriously old. I saw some Snickers bars as well for Super Bowl XL... heh. This was at a dollar store by the way... so go figure.

Does anyone really know if chocolate or other candy can go bad? Or is it just speculation? I don't mean stale, I mean 'bad enough to give you a tummy-ache.'

I wonder how all of you would react to the idea of eating a pack of candy from an MRE, if the idea of eating slightly 'expired' M&Ms repulses you ...

Why buy American chocolate? It is terrible. Too much sugar and not enough chocolate mass to make it worth my money. I stock up when I go to Europe and anyone I know who goes there knows to bring me back like 5 bars. Even the store brands over there are superior to our best stuff.

This is why it is good to avoid food from discount stores.

This reminds me of the time I bought shampoo from Filene's Basement that the manufacturer (Phyto) told me was ten years old.

Off topic, but relevant:

The advertising banner I have at the end of this post is for the lobbying arm of the cable industry; the tag line is "Cable Competes; Consumers Win."

Does anyone else find this ironic? The cable cos need to take their ad agency to task for propping up Consumerist with their ad dollars.

And, Consumerist better be careful to never say anything nice about cable cos now, lest you all be charged with playing favorites with your advertisers.

now if i could jut find out what the codes were on kellogs creal those bastards

The codes on chocolate actually display the date it was produced, not the date that it expires.

BTW, my sister used to work for a local candy company (considered one of the finer candy companies). The white stuff that comes to the surface of chocolate is coco butter. It's in there whether it's on the surface or not and comes out over time. Dates on the packages are not always a good indicator. If the candy is custom packed as in custom orders or samplers, they have the workers "buff" the surface of the candies to remove it.

You don't always get what you think you're getting.

@krose:

This is true at least for Nestle and Godiva... I guess Hershey's is actually an expiration date.

I have bitten into some peanut M&Ms that seemed way past their expiration date.

@overbysara: If they were to print that right there, they wouldn't be able rid of the "expired" stuff. At least, not at the same price as the rest.

@spryte: When dyeing Easter Eggs this year, we discovered at least two eggs that had a hard-to-read date stamp on them ... hard to read until you dyed the egg, that is; then it became very legible. Kind of ruined the easter egg effect, though.

@ct_price: I had some of the best chocolate when I was in Ireland a few years ago! It would be worth a return trip just for that - and the bacon and cabbage . . . and the Guiness! Um, I need to renew my passport and call my travel agent.

@ct_price: I've had crappy supermarket chocolate in Germany. Just 'cause it's Europe doesn't guarantee good chocolate.

Thanks so much for sending this in, Leo! I'm printing this out and sticking it in my wallet - hopefully it'll help prevent the horror that is old Reese cups >_<

But I want my JuJuBes to be stale.
Then they're hard & crack when you bite them, not that soft, gummy mess!
They have an open expiration date on them, I try to find ones that are past that.

@ct_price: Maybe because he lives in America and just wants a snack at 7-11?

@Guizzy: And yet they manage to print expiration dates on milk without the world coming to an end.

Perhaps the candy industry thinks they can get away with it because hardly anybody can tell the difference between stale and fresh candy?

All these posts and not a single demand for an EECB or charge backs?

In virtually all jurisdictions, it's illegal for a merchant to sell food beyond its expiration date.

And what about M&M's that are cojoined and clearly deformed? I find this outrageous and suggest a class action.

Unfortunately efforts made to legislate "open date coding" on food stuff have been successfully fought by the food industry. It's good to publish code deciphers on these items.

@backbroken: it doesn't go bad, it's just the fat separating from the chocolate which makes the chocolate brittle and a little (or a lot depending on age) less tasty.

if you have cooking chocolate and it "goes bad," you can try reheating it slowly to melt the chocolate down to mix the oil back together again...

I work at a store that sells American and European brands of chocolate. The coding depends on the country it was produced in and the country it was produced for. Also, as stated above, depending on the brand, it may be a production date or an expiration date. To decipher, we would have sheets sent out by each manufacturer with the codes and we would tag the merchandise with the end date. Some stuff was shitty, with letters for numbers, so it would read ABFI56P and you'd have to look up to see that each stupid letter stood for a number, which you'd then find out was julian dated, so figuring out these codes would require a calculator and a Mayan calendar. If it was a production date, you'd then have to figure out when it expires.

In General,
Non-Filled chocolate has a 24-month shelf life.
Filled Chocolate has 9 months to 18 months, depending on the manufacturer. (The finer the chocolate, the shorter the time.)

@backbroken: I perform private health inspections for a couple of major retailers - as a part of my job I look for expired products on the shelves.

Foods which are considered "potentially hazardous" are defined as having a high moisture content, low acidity, and high water activity (free water that may be used by microbes). These types of foods are the ones that you would look at with a concern for spoilage.

Foods which do not meet the above qualifications do not generally spoil, but are simply beyond what the manufacturer has determined to be the optimal shelf life. They are still safe to eat, and depending on how they've been stored, may be indistinguishable from other products on the shelf in terms of taste and quality.

The code for Gertrude Hawk is as follows: There will be a four-digit number printed on the item. The first digit is the last digit of the year of manufacture; the remaining three digits are the day of that year. For example, 8032 would be February 1st, 2008.

Note, though, that this is the date of manufacture, not the date of expiry. The expiry date is 6 months later.

I agree with the others who say buy chocolate from Europe. Seriously, I realize not everyone can do this, but if you have friends who travel to Europe often, have them buy you chocolate there.

I go to Switzerland a couple times a year on business now, and I always stock up.

And I don't intend to engage any of those Belgian chocolate fanboys / fangirls who say their chocolate is better than Swiss. Feh, whatever, it's all better than US chocolate.

@cwlodarczyk:

Foods which are considered "potentially hazardous" are defined as having a high moisture content, low acidity, and high water activity

LOL as I read your comment, it occurred to me that I learned this very fact about 25 years ago in college Chemistry. Funny how that stuff comes back to haunt you later :)

You say 'candy' - do you mean chocolate bars? (Sorry, in Canada 'candy' is hard candy.) This applies to chocolate bars? If so, thanks for the info! This is really useful, actually, as a lot of random corner shoppes sometimes sell rank, old chocolate bars you don't realise are so until you've taken that first bite and - blech! x

@ct_price: Im with you. I have a friend that travels to Germany very often. She buys HUGE amounts of "Milka" brand chocolate to bring back here each time, so that we dont eat the stuff from the US.

@Alger: Expired milk gets all curdly/sour/disgusting. Stale candy is only not as good as fresher candy. If given the choice, I'd rather buy fresher candy than expired candy, unless if the expired candy has been discounted significantly. If it was immediately apparent what candy is expired and what candy isn't, the good/fresh ones would be quickly sold, and stores would be stuck with loads of expired candy that no one wants to buy when they could buy fresh. So those stores will start requesting fresh candy only from their suppliers, in turn get the problem of getting rid of older candy.

There's simply very few incentive for candy companies to do this, whereas the milk industry has to in order to avoid being sued.

How elitist is it to be like, "Oh, don't eat AMERICAN chocolate; European chocolate is SO MUCH BETTER"? Guess what, y'all, I can only afford 50 cents for a chocolate bar.

BackBroken:
Sugar (and salt) are natural preservatives - some candies will crystallize over time, but I think it would take a loooong time to be worried about adverse gastric effects, other than overindulging

I buy candy from stores with high turnover.

And, while I love high-quality chocolate, I hope I'm never unable to appreciate a Snickers.

Are you sure some of the codes aren't the production dates? I have a bag of chocolate here that starts with 808 serial. It also lists an 06/09 expiration.

@Crrusher: The codes are on the top of every box in plain English. Almost all cereals have the expiration date on the top.

Food banks will keep unopened cereal for up to 6 months after the expiration date, so there's no real hurry (in most cases).

Eggs, like candy, don't really go bad. They just get stale as the connective tissue inside decays. Stale eggs are still fine for scrambling, or any recipes that don't separate the yolk.

(Bad eggs are bad from day one, whether they're stale or not, it's just more noticeable and less safe when they get old.)

That said, I'm pretty sure that doesn't apply to organic eggs or eggs you got from your own hens or whatever... the eggs you buy at the grocery are handled and processed carefully, which extends their shelf lives radically.

@pegr: Bloom can substantially alter chocolate's taste and texture. If those fats are on the surface, that means they're not in the bar where they belong.

what i really need is some way to tell if vending machine candy is expired before i buy it... or maybe the vendors should check in on the machines more often!

@ct_price: Consumer preferences in America are for sugar, not chocolate. There have of course been recent evolutions in taste with the rise in "premium" chocolate goods. However, most Americans are still looking for sugar. It is therefore pointless to compare supermarket chocolate in the U.S. to that which is sold in Europe. While you have a right to your opinion, to assume that your opinion is a valid estimation of the manufacturing or importing capacities of U.S. companies is silly. If U.S. consumers desired high cocoa mass chocolate on a broad scale, then the need would be met. If you require more evidence, begin by examining importing trends for fruits and vegetables in the U.S. over the last century. But really it's just simple economics: a rise in demand is met by a rise in supply. Our economy is market driven.

@51tiggy: I don't see it as elitist. I compare European chocolates to lobster and American chocolate to Long John Silvers. I eat Long John Silvers for more often than lobster, but when I get a good lobster, it is no comparison.

American chocolate follows the Wal-Mart principle - cheap, crappy products for the masses at low, low prices. At least it used to be low prices.