Expiration dates on food

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Why oh why OH WHY is this not standardized by law?

We've been spending a frustrating week or so purging candy and grocery stuff out of the swamp's backroom. When doing this, we have to check the date codes on all packages, so we don't wind up stocking expired product from the backroom to the floor.

For a lot of items this is easy--"sell by xx/xx" is stamped right on the package. So why is this not mandated by law?

There are lots of items where the expiration date is given by a bunch of gobbledegook of random letters and numbers, with the expiration date given somewhere within that. And it might not even be an expiration date; it could be a production date, and you have to adjust forward by several months for the real expiration date.

We've got sheets in the backroom attempting to explain some of the latter codes, but as often as not they're wrong. The way I see it, if we can be popped by health inspectors for selling outdated product, the manufacturers can make it so checking for outdated product is as simple as looking for a calendar date.

[Andara Bledin]

The codes are most likely production codes that give, among other info, the date of manufacture, time, location, and machine so that if a problem crops up they can track down when and where it happened based on that code.

My tea says: A03211 09:45


Anything that actually spoils and will make people sick hopefully is already mandated to have a sell by and/or use by date on it. Everything else, well... Best you can hope for is proper inventory management keeping track of what you bought and when.

^-.-^

[insertNameHere]

We sell tons of out dated chew because I don't give a shit enough to look up what that bizzare date means, also it makes it easier to sell shit that is about to be outdated.

For certain things that say, sell by X everyone can read that. but DSFSD4353S, is fucking gibberish and you won't know the difference between DF43543Df42. One might mean sell by tomorrow and the other says sell by 6 months from now. If im the consumer, I'm gonna grab the one i know has the better chance of lasting awhile.

So my theory is they do it to avoid people trying to always get the freshest making it hard to sell your orignal product. For some of our chew, people ask for the "freshest" some of our idiot co-workers comply and go in the back and grab stuff that just got off the truck that was made 3/28/11, good till. 4/28/11..... but you could have easily sold them something made 3/18/11, good till 4/18/11. perfectly fresh, likely to be consumed before the use by date. That will now sit on the shelf till 4/10/11 and most people will avoid it because the new batch isn't going to expire in a week. Fun side effect, we have all expired product in system that CAN'T be sold, but is still in inventory and they won't send us more till we get authorization to write it off, making it 2-3 weeks till fresh chew is obtained.

obscure date codes can be beneficial but still a pain in the ass

[Cats]

Ooh, I hate this too. Mars Corp (the people who make Snickers and M&M's and stuff) are NOTORIOUS for this. You know where the dates are? On the shipping boxes, if at all. Who the hell is going to keep those and compare them to a list with the lot numbers on the packages? Granted, most of the time that stuff sells quickly enough and has a long enough shelf life that it likely won't go out of date before sold and eaten, but still, the consumer does have a right to know that for themselves.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Ooh, I hate this too. Mars Corp (the people who make Snickers and M&M's and stuff) are NOTORIOUS for this. You know where the dates are? On the shipping boxes, if at all. Who the hell is going to keep those and compare them to a list with the lot numbers on the packages? Granted, most of the time that stuff sells quickly enough and has a long enough shelf life that it likely won't go out of date before sold and eaten, but still, the consumer does have a right to know that for themselves.

You obviously have never been at my store. We are sitting on fucktons and fucktons of Mars candy bars.

This was due to Halloween. We have snack-size Mars candy in the regular grocery section. Then for Halloween we also had it in another section of seasonal candy.

Plus last year corporate brought in these huge dump boxes we had to set on pallets and fill with even more Mars snack size candy.

When Halloween came and went and all that candy was still sitting there unsold I could've just shot myself. All that candy had to come off those shelves and out of those dump boxes, get repackaged into empty toilet-paper size boxes, get marked with the expiration dates (fortunately these had the date given in XX/XXXX format), and put away in the backroom someplace. We have shelves and shelves of this candy in the back. We've also got in dumped in random other places just to get rid of it.

That candy doesn't sell. If we're lucky we pull maybe 3 bags of that shit a week, and it's going to start expiring in May. And corporate will not let us put up special displays of this candy, marked down as the expiration date draws near. They'd rather waste their money and have us throw it all away.

It's shit like this that has me convinced our buyers and corporate officials would be out of their depth running a front-lawn lemonade stand with a misspelled sign.

[muses_nightmare]

Uhg I hated searching for expiration dates on crap when I was trying to stock shelves. I also hated that some coworkers I had apparently couldn't be bothered to read signs posted on bins of things like milk that say that they are expired so they'd put them back out, and usually they were really really expired, like a week because the company that delivered the milk picked it up when they did deliveries. One time I even had a big X of masking tape across the top of the crate that said Expired DO NOT PUT OUT, in red marker.

When I worked for a K-mart/Target kind of store years and years ago they used to stick a big bin of the just expired chocolate bars and chips in the back room for the staff when stuff had to be written off. Really those things don't suddenly turn bad the moment the expiration date passes, especially not the chocolate bars. It didn't happen a lot though, and I usually ended up missing out on the reeses when it did

[Ginger Tea]

Our products have a very short shelf life, they would be fine stored under correct temperatures longer, but our policy is five days, but as they are meant to be eaten on the 3rd day its not a problem.

The problem arrises with bought in stock not being rotated by stores or my coworkers getting one stack of yoghurts and not checking the dates against another. The times I've had to throw a few dozzen yoghurts out as they put em on top of what is already there, If I don't then its a fair assumption that they will send it out and we will get it in the neck for sending out stuff that is out or too close to being out of date.

[linguist]

My tea says: A03211 09:45

That would be a Julian date code. It breaks down into 4 parts:

A is the manufacturing facility code.

032 indicates the product was made on the 32nd day of the year. In other words, February 1.

11 is the year of manufacture.

09:45 is the time of manufacture.

Julian dating is used because it serves as both a date code and a batch code, making it easier to track back items in case a problem requires recall of a particular batch.

[Andara Bledin]

Julian dating is used because it serves as both a date code and a batch code, making it easier to track back items in case a problem requires recall of a particular batch.

Well, I knew that it related to the when and where of it's production. And the 3-digit day I've run into before, but for some reason, my mind wouldn't separate the year portion out so I could recognize it as a date, though I tried. But the code is for tracking and quality purposes, not for stock rotation.

In this particular instance, for things that actually go stale and that would need to be rotated, it might be in a store's interest to go back to labeling the products that need it for ease of determination. It might take a bit more labor on the front end, but then you won't have people trying to hunt down date codes after it's been put on the shelf.

^-.-^

[Rapscallion]

Ooh, I hate this too. Mars Corp (the people who make Snickers and M&M's and stuff) are NOTORIOUS for this. You know where the dates are? On the shipping boxes, if at all. Who the hell is going to keep those and compare them to a list with the lot numbers on the packages? Granted, most of the time that stuff sells quickly enough and has a long enough shelf life that it likely won't go out of date before sold and eaten, but still, the consumer does have a right to know that for themselves.

I think that would be illegal in the UK - I'm almost certain each individual food item is required to have the date on it. Probably the same for all of Yurp, actually.

Rapscallion

[HYHYBT]

hat candy doesn't sell. If we're lucky we pull maybe 3 bags of that shit a week, and it's going to start expiring in May. And corporate will not let us put up special displays of this candy, marked down as the expiration date draws near. They'd rather waste their money and have us throw it all away.

So.... why didn't they put it on clearance when November 1st rolled around, like *every other store* did?

On the Julian code thing: why would they write it that way instead of year first? (ie A11032 9:45) I know, "if it makes sense, it's not allowed," but there generally *is* a reason even if it's a bad one.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

So.... why didn't they put it on clearance when November 1st rolled around, like *every other store* did?

Because it's not special "Halloween only" candy, identifiable by packaging or brought in just for the holiday and then discontinued. It's the same Snickers candy we sell year round and it isn't going to be discontinued anytime soon. Corporate would have to put it on clearance and then take it off clearance later, when our inventory is more manageable.

That said, I've seen it happen where items go on clearance and then go back to regular price much later, but only with seasonal items we'd like to get rid of, but if worse comes to worst we'll carry it over to the next year.

[HYHYBT]

Makes sense.

But surely, at least, they'll know better than to order so much this year?

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

God, I hope so.