Always Check the (Sometimes Sketchy) Expiration Dates on Food
This is a friendly Consumerist reminder: always make sure you check the expiration dates on all of your food purchases, especially as alternative expiration 'Codes' confuse the employees checking for spoilage.
Insider E writes about confusion regarding the new (and seemingly overcomplicated) expiration 'codes'.
I work in a retail store with a pretty healthy-sized food section. It isn't a grocery, so that may be the problem. My big issue right now is the codes that a lot of food companies seem to be using instead of just printing an expiration date. Instead of 040510 (April 5, 2010) I see a lot of codes like 29B1348032, where 032 will be the processing plant code, 134 will be the Julian Date (134th day of the year), 8 will stand for 2008 and 29B is supposed to be ignored. Or even the dreaded "Produced On" date, where it gives a code for the date it was made on and then we have to figure the expiration date out of that. We have a huge book full of decoders for these products.
We recently got a new food-department supervisor, so a pretty thorough check of inventory was done and I had the opportunity/misfortune of being one of the team leaders checking dates. Here's what I found:
(1.) Food manufacturers will change these codes frequently and not update the vendors.
(2.) Consumers cannot read these codes and, most importantly
(3.) Employees cannot read these codes.We don't have the training or the resources to determine if many of these products are out of date... therefore many of these products were ridiculously out of date (some by more than 2 years). As a result of the audit, I will not even consider purchasing food with a code instead of an expiration date. Maybe groceries have better lists than we do, but it seems like asking for trouble.
Have you ever encountered these archaic codes? If so, make sure you leave the address where we can all get our matching decoder rings.
Pic: [The Joy Of The Mundane]
Post a comment
Comments:
i bought some frozen moldy corndogs from the dollar general once.
I see these arcane codes on more and more products every time I go to the grocery store. Is it really so abhorrent to these companies to provide simple, easy-to-understand information about their products?
i work in a grocery store and assure you, we have no such book. or maybe we do, and no one knows where or what it is.
I think it depends on the product. For example, most people would never think that the average air plain is at least 15 years old. They look new because they get repainted and refurnished every few years.
I don't care about my oreo cookies being "expired" but I do want my fruits and veggies fresh
Spam has codes like this.. well a production date if not an expries date. They teach you how to decode them at the Spam Museum.
One benefit of shopping at walmart is shelf life. At my walmart they are constantly reshelfing products, thus it would appear products are never in the store for more then a day or two.
@Micromegas: Worse, half the time codes are in locations that are so hard to find it's not even funny. Finding an expiration date on a food product should not be the edible equivalent of Where's !@#$ing Waldo.
I'm finding more and more "Best before date on [top / bottom]" and then there is no date printed in the specified location or anywhere else, either.
And my local Safeway has sold me rotten fruit 3 times (looks fine on the outside, gone on the inside) so now I can't buy produce either. *sigh* I need to garden. But first I need non-concrete land. And, er, not-winter.
The same goes for almost any large grocery store (although i'm sure if you look hard enough, you will find an expired product in any store). It's the smaller, less popular markets, mini-marts and non-supermarket stores (I think there was an article on here about CVS having expired food products).
And unless it's a highly-perishable products, most things can last months, if not longer than their date. I opened an old potato chip bag yesterday dated best if used by Nov. 5th and they still tasted just fine.
There's a, umm, discount store near me with the inventive name "good stuff cheap". They have a food section, with a sign reminding customers that the sell-by dates are just suggestions and that the expired food they sell is perfectly fine (or your money back!).
Some food will last quite a while beyond the sell-buy date - after all, it's the sell-by date, not the use-by date. Of course, canned food will last way longer than, say, crackers, and stuff like meat and bread does need to be used or frozen pretty close to the date.
Still, stores should be keeping track of this stuff, and companies should be making it easy. Really, it's kind of surprising they don't - you think they would want stuff to be at it's best, and you think they would rather have the store throw out the old stock and buy more than sell expired stuff.
eh, microwave something long enough and everything harmful will be zapped.
If I can't decipher it, I'm not buying it...
And if it's produce (or anything else for that matter) and I get home and it's opened and discovered to be no good, you will be giving me my money back.
I used to be stock lead at an AAFES shopette in Augsburg, Germany a little over ten years ago. At 17, I was in charge of the Class 6 alcohol department, frozen foods and medical (weird combination, I know). When I got there, most of the baby food products had expired by anywhere from 6 to 12 months. And people had been buying this shit. None of my predecessors bothered to check the dates. Ever.
It's one thing to scarf stale food as an adult, but to sell it to infants? Deplorable.
a friend of mine bought "yo-baby" (yogurt for babies) and tried to feed it to her daughter. well the baby was having none of that and so she gave up, and decided she'd eat it instead. it tasted AWFUL! she turned it over and discovered it was 2 weeks out of date! granted, she should have looked at the date in the store, but you'd think that the small town grocery she bought it from would be checking dates on dairy products more often that every 2 weeks. when they took it back to the store they just gave her a fresh package, no apology at all. which wouldn't be that big of a deal except this is meant for kids under a year old so her daughter could have gotten really sick!
I used to work at a company with a vending machine for soda and a machine for snacks (chips, cookies, etc). When the guy came to replenish the machine, he would leave any expired goods out on the table. Expired sodas and chips taste just fine - especially when they're free!
@Oranges w/ Cheese: The first batch of Spam was made in 1937. Next year they plan on making a second.
@samurailynn:
Heh. I used to do that when I did vending at a factory where I worked in the cafeteria. Also the bread/pastry guy who also worked for the food company I worked for would let us take the expired donuts home, rather than put them back on his truck and haul them back.
Mmmm. Little white powdered expired donuts.
That's bizarre. Isn't in the company's interest to print a sell-by or expiration date so that people buy their products more often?
@EtoilePB: Rotten produce seems to be a hallmark of some Safeways their sister-stores. I used to seem to bring home an inordinate amount of rotten potatoes, garlic, and onions from my local Genuardi, until I stopped shopping there. The stuff looked fine in the store but was crap when I'd cut into it. And it was expensive.
@calquist: Except for the poisons the bacteria/fungus have already produced, and are already in the food. :(
@mike: And that's in the commercial fleet. When it comes to small, private planes, they average age is 30 years. There are a few reasons for this. Due to product liability problems, almost no small aircraft were built in the 1980s. When producting did resume, they were extremely expensive. And because they receive careful annual inspections, aircraft are well-maintained and have a much longer service life than, say, a car.
@aguacarbonica: Maybe they're under pressure from retailers who don't want to get stuck with unsaleable expired product?
My simple solution is to "punish" the company whenever they don't have a human readable date code and I'm not sure how old the product is. They invariably have an 800 number on the package so I call it, ask them what the date code means and complain that it isn't written clearly.
I highly recommend everyone do this. Eventually the food companies will find it easier to use open date codes rather than field all the phone calls.
@aguacarbonica: Sort of like expiration dates on 99% of medicines, they really don't mean anything except "throw me away and go buy more". I knew a nurse that said they had a whole stash of "expired" Tylenol they would stll give to patients and bill insurance $4 for out-of-date meds.
I work for a major food manufacturer in Canada. I make no warranty on my statements, I'm not in the regulatory or QA department or anything, but here's some tidbits of knowledge I have come to learn:
1. Best before dates are typically "on the safe side". Shelf lives of some products will vary depending on factors such as the age of the raw ingredients, delay between cooking and packaging, etc. So, generally, a product will be good past its' stated best before date.
2. Best before dates only mean something if you don't open the package. That cryovaced block of cheese which is good for 6 months won't be good that much longer once you introduce it to air.
3. When you see a cryptic Julian date on something, it's NOT the best before date, it's the date of packaging. This product has no set shelf life -- or at least the standard "1 year or more". But if you eat it past this date, it's not going to harm you, just might not be so fresh or be freezerburned or whatever.
It's not so easy to track this sort of thing, because you never know whether the customer in the store picked up the older box or the newer box of the product. The onus is on the store to ensure their stock is rotated properly. But with these long shelf life products this should not be a concern -- as long as the newer stuff is placed at the back of the shelf, the old stuff will sell first. That's the reason for the cryptic code dating in the first place -- so that customers will not distinguish the age of the product and therefore buy whatever is presented.
@madanthony: My local "Good Stuff Cheap" doesn't have that sign... Haven't been deterred by the lack thereof yet.
I'm a vehement label reader and date checker and have absolutely never seen anything like this. But then again, I only buy real food.
I've noticed that candies are especially bad that this. My coworkers and I have no clue on how to determine that something is expired, aside from the fact that it may be dusty or on the back of the shelf.
I have found some of these date codes to be completely undecipherable. Others have no expire or date code at all anywhere. I am not too keen on canned food that has zero information about date and location produced. After being burned a few times by finding I bought something expired after I got it home I look for a date on everything I pick up. Luckily I buy fewer and fewer canned or bottled items these days so it makes it less of a pain. I did notice that the big cans of things they sell at Sam's Club have clear easy to read dates on the cans. Maybe it has something to do with messing where the average consumer but not with restaurant owners?
I have noticed a real problem with onions lately. They look ok on the outside but you cut into them and the inside is rotten and moldy. I started seeing this in bagged onions at Sam's Club so I started buying them at the grocery instead. Now I have had the same problem at two seperate grocery chains and different brands of onions. About every 4th onion is shit and ends up in the trash.
A lot of products are good well beyond the use by date. Shelf life testing takes time (liability issues). To run tests to have a shelf life test of say two years rather than one year is not thought to be worth the expense and time(even thought the product might actually last decades). I worked in the can industry for over a decade and know the product would last a very long time (I have a 20 year old beer can that is still carbonated).
Plants use closed codes (hard to decipher) and open codes (Best By). The closed codes actually contain more useful information to the manufacturer as they usually contain the plant code (since many manufacturers produce at more than one plant), what production line was used, etc.
@Micromegas: Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if there was some sort of "government" that could "regulate" these things and get companies to do it?
Can't do that, though -- that's socialism! And socialism's bad, right? At least that's what the lady with the funny accent from Alasker's been telling me.
@Bladefist: Wal-mart would actually have to stock items to have them expire. My mom told me about complaining to them because they didn't have the specialty, organic eggs for months. When the store called her about her complaint, they didn't know when they would have them again. Not sure how that happens since everything is supposed to be computerized. She's given up on Wal-mart for a lot of things because they won't consistently have them.
The grocery store I go to is smaller, and occasionally does have expired things on the shelf, but they usually have food on their shelves. I try to check expiration dates on perishable items like frozen foods and dairy items. I even check them on pop from gas stations because they tend to keep them past the date and they end up being flat.
Its going to depend on the environment products are kept in too, some stuff will spoil easier in the summer since its hot out but will last longer in the winter since the heat doesn't get to it. Flour and any type of powdered mix type product is prone to worms in the summer, and probably any other time of the year, and I have personally seen worms in these products.
Back on topic one of my local grocery stores has a real problem with keeping expired stuff OUT of the dairy section. This is also the section where your most likely going to get sick if you eat expired food. Mind you this has been going on for YEARS with them and you can complain as much as you want but you still find expired stuff on the shelves in the dairy of this store. As far as I can tell this only affects the dairy products as everything else in the store is very fresh. Needless to say we are very careful about what we buy at that store which will remain nameless here. We also try to avoid shopping there whenever possible but sometimes you need that odd item. This is a huge grocery store too so it really shouldn't have these problems.
@bohemian: I've had a problem getting decent garlic lately. It's either got those black moldy spots on the paper, it's dry and old, or it's sprouting. I've been buying onions at Meijer and they were good.
I've also found that Aldi's has decent produce. Their avocados are always good with no bad spots in them. It may help that I live in the same town as one of their distribution centers, but you would think that if they can get good stuff, so can other stores.
@Preyfar: Aw, man ... I asked for a copy of Where's !@#$ing Waldo for Christmas, but all I got was a box of expired crackers.
@samurailynn: i seem to remember hershey's having a very cryptic code from my days in retail. somthing about every month having a letter (jan = a, feb = b, etc) and then you had to count forward 8 months? either way, expired chocolate still tastes pretty much the same. =)
@Bladefist: I'd be more concerned with unhappy, underpaid employees not properly rotating the existing stock on the shelves and just shoving the new stuff in front of old stuff.
I worked at a grocery store all through college, and when we did "go backs" (returning misplaced or returned products to their rightful homes), I would take it upon myself to set aside things that I saw were obviously out of date. These were things with actual dates, not codes. I once collected an ENTIRE shopping cart of salad dressing that was past the date. When I went to show the grocery manager, he didn't really seem to care. I also got sick on my lunch one time from eating a yogurt that turned out to be 2 weeks past its sell by date. I had just bought it 5 minutes before! And this chain is the CLEAN chain in Florida, the one with the good reputation that starts with P and ends with X. Now I always check the dates that I can, and I still get grossed out when I find something that's even a day off.
@Micromegas: It would be wonderful if they actually sent around how to read their stuff. Where I used to work, some of the "larger" candy and food companies send around representatives about once a month who are supposed to check the stock, and have us toss anything they said was expired (they'd do this even for stuff that had proper easily read expirey dates). At least most of them were nice enough (mainly the chocolate bar companies as they had most of the wierd codes) to leave how to read whatever the current cyphers were.
It is encouraging though that a lot of companies are switching to readable dates, even if some canning companies are using produced on dates rather than best before.
@Preyfar: You have to admit that markets in Germany can be a little ghetto. At a store where they put out pallets instead of shelving I wouldn't expect employees to check dates.
mmmmm. pennicillin!