Who invented sell by dates

It wasn't even actually called a "sell-by-date" until Marks is so proud of its innovation that Twiggy trumpets it in their latest ad campaign. In the United States, federal law requires only that infant formula be dated , but many states have similar regulations for products like milk, eggs and meat.

But most food manufacturers date pretty much everything anyway. There's a fun bit of speculation , which one reporter attributed to a park ranger at Alcatraz , that Al Capone popularized expiration dates on milk back in the s.

He bought up a milk processor, called Meadowmoor Dairies, and he lobbied the Chicago City Council to pass a law requiring visible date stamps on milk containers. The NRDC report details how consumers in the s started to buy more processed foods, and as they got further away from the direct production of the ingredients in their meals, they got more worried about just how safe and fresh those ingredients were:. Open dating uses a date label that includes a month, day, and year in a format clearly evident to the consumer.

And while Americans once knew the farmer who bottled their milk, it was now delivered by a faceless source at an unknown location—with no indication of when it was bottled, or whether it was safe to drink.

This became a growing concern in the s, a time when the Capone family had a big hand in the dairy industry. It remains unclear if the story is true, but it does provide an interesting footnote in the struggle of enforcing food quality through expiration dates in the US. And, contrary to popular belief, we still don't have food labeling that has anything to do with safety—just quality.

While "Sell-By" is an instruction to stores indicating how long the food should be displayed on shelves, and "Use-By" is the last possible date at which the product will be "at peak quality," "Best if Used By", says the USDA , most clearly illustrates to consumers that the food's quality will be maintained for a certain period of time, after which, it will decline—not that it should go in the trash.

The history of food labeling is less than years old, and has only become standard practice in the last 50 years. Part of the difficulty in regulating expiration dates is due to the fact that neither the USDA, nor any other governmental organization, actually enforces them. The labels are inconsistent, too. What the label actually indicates varies from producer to producer.

Furthermore, those dates might not even be consistent across brands of the same food product — peanut butter, say, or strawberry jam. Most packaged foods are perfectly fine for weeks or months past the date. Canned and frozen goods last for years. Properly pasteurized milk, which is free of pathogens, should be fine if it tastes and smells fine. Their biggest incentive is to make sure you eat the food when it tastes the way they think it should.

Those traditions certainly have been retained in regions where Americans still make kimchi and half-sours and farm cheese. Instead, we rely on companies to tell us what food is good for us and when to get rid of it. The problem is bigger than individual consumers. Some states bar grocery stores from donating or selling out-of-date foods to food banks and other services designed to help those living with food insecurity. Abundance indicates quality.

But that mindset naturally, even inevitably, leads to waste. Furthermore, if a manufacturer changes the label on their cookie packages, all the old packages will probably just be discarded to maintain uniformity. Otherwise you have to be sprinkling and trimming them all the time. Some businesses have cropped up to try to fix this larger-scale problem, like Misfits Market and Imperfect Foods.

But across the country, the standard practice for your average American consumer still stands. Make a big trip to the grocery store to buy your food from the glossy displays.

When food expires, throw it out. The follow-up data to the Harvard study found that standardizing the date labeling system across the country — rather than leaving it to more local governments to address in a scattershot fashion — could be incredibly beneficial to the economy and to consumers. But fixing it has proven harder. Since the s, Congress has periodically introduced legislation to modernize and standardize the system, in various forms.

But, as Broad Leib told me, it can be an uphill battle. While Broad Leib and her colleagues argue that businesses particularly national ones would benefit from trying to meet one federal standard rather than different standards in different states, the philosophical differences can still be tough to surmount.

Furthermore, Congress just moves slowly. Quite a bit has happened in the years since Broad Leib and her colleagues first published their study. Seeing the problem, two major associations the Consumer Brands Association and the Food Marketing Institute put together a working group to design a standard date label that would work for both businesses and consumers.

That system corresponds roughly to a standard used in many other countries. This could make the work easier for the federal government to act, she says. We have some data on what works for consumers. And we know that these work for industry.