Expiration Dates Aren’t Safety Dates

Somewhere in your kitchen right now there is a date. On the milk, on the yogurt, on the bag of tortillas. It looks official. It looks like the result of a test. It looks like the day the food stops being safe. It is none of those things.

Here is the fact that reorganizes how you read every label in your refrigerator: federal law requires a date on exactly one food product sold in America. Infant formula. That is the entire list.

The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service says it plainly: except for infant formula, product dating is not required by federal regulations, and dates are not an indicator of the product’s safety. Manufacturers put them there to estimate when the food is at its best quality — best flavor, best texture. A quality guess, printed in a font that reads like a deadline.

What the phrases actually mean

The words around the date do carry meaning. Just not the meaning most people assume.

• “Sell By” is not addressed to you at all. It tells the store how long to display the product — it is an inventory-management note that happens to be printed where shoppers can see it.
• “Best If Used By” is a flavor-and-texture estimate. The FDA said in a 2019 letter that it strongly supports this phrase for quality-based dates precisely because it only describes quality.
• “Use By” is the last date the manufacturer recommends for peak quality. On one food — infant formula — it is a real safety-and-nutrition deadline. On everything else, it is not a safety date.

If that seems like a system nobody designed, that is because nobody designed it. In 2013, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic published the first full legal analysis of date labels, titled The Dating Game. What they found was a patchwork: 41 states plus Washington, D.C. require date labels on at least some foods, 20 states restrict selling or donating food past its date, and no two states have to agree on what the date means. The same carton of milk can be legal to sell in one state and contraband across the river.

Industry eventually tried to clean this up itself. In 2017, the two big grocery trade groups — the Food Marketing Institute and the Grocery Manufacturers Association — launched a voluntary standard collapsing the ten-plus phrases then in circulation down to two: “Best If Used By” for quality and “Use By” for the small set of highly perishable products with a genuine safety concern. Voluntary is the operative word. Nothing requires any company to follow it.

What the confusion costs

The Dating Game cites an industry survey with a startling implication: more than 90% of Americans may be throwing food away prematurely because they read a quality date as a safety date. That is a survey-based estimate, not a census of kitchens — but even discounted heavily, it describes a nation of people discarding edible food on schedule.

We have written before about what that waste adds up to. The numbers from those pieces still stand:

Date confusion is not the whole story of food waste — portioning, forgotten leftovers and over-buying all play their parts, and we covered them in Why Your Grocery Budget Never Works. But it is the one cause you can fix entirely by understanding a label, tonight, for free.

So what actually determines safety?

Time and temperature. Not the printed date.

The FSIS guidance is that food from packages with a passed date — stored properly the whole time — should remain wholesome until spoilage is evident. A yogurt kept cold at 40°F does not know what its label says. A yogurt left in a hot car for an afternoon is a risk regardless of what its label says. The date cannot save mishandled food, and it does not condemn well-handled food.

One place to stay conservative: the genuinely risky categories — deli meats, unpasteurized products, ready-to-eat foods for pregnant or immunocompromised people — deserve the cautious end of the storage charts. The point of this piece is not “dates are fake, eat anything.” It is that the date was never the safety instrument, and the actual safety instruments — your refrigerator, a clock, your senses — are ones you already own.

The quiet fix

Most food does not get thrown out because someone judged it spoiled. It gets thrown out because it sat unplanned until a printed number gave permission to stop feeling guilty about it.

That is a planning failure wearing a safety costume. The fix is not memorizing label law — it is a week where the perishables you bought have a scheduled job before their quality fades. Hestia builds the week from your pantry outward, so the spinach and the yogurt get planned into meals instead of waiting out the clock in the crisper drawer.

Sources. USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, Food Product Dating (fsis.usda.gov): product dating not required by federal regulations except infant formula; dates are quality, not safety; “Sell-By” is for store inventory; properly stored food past its date should be wholesome until spoilage is evident. NRDC & Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, The Dating Game (September 2013): 41 states + D.C. require dates on some foods, 20 states restrict sale or donation past the date; the “more than 90%” figure is an industry-survey estimate cited in that report. FMI/GMA voluntary two-phrase standard announced February 2017. FDA letter supporting “Best If Used By” for quality dates, May 23, 2019. Waste figures: NRDC ~$1,500/family/year; ReFED 2024 data, $762 per person per year, as previously published on this blog. Storage-time guidance: foodsafety.gov cold storage charts.