Do you understand the difference between a Use by Date and a Best Before Date?

From a packaging and food waste perspective, adjustment of date labelling communication systems have been identified as the most efficient measure to reduce food waste, which has the greatest economic value per ton in terms of consumer food waste reduction and the lowest costs regarding the business practices (ReFED, 2016).

Minimising Food Waste wherever possible is everyone’s responsibility with all of us being able to make effective changes. So, let’s start with an easy exercise…

Next time you are in your refrigerator I invite you to find a product with a Use By Date and one with a Best Before Date. Do you throw the food away when it is nearing the date or when it is past the date? What triggers you to automatically throw the food away? Is it judgement, common sense or simply because somewhere deep inside you believe that food will be unsafe to eat after that date?  

Now ask yourself would your attitude to date labelling change if you understood the difference between the a Use By Date and a Best Before Date?

So what is Date Labelling?

Date labelling is designed to guide consumers on how long food can be kept before the quality deteriorates, or once the item is unsafe to eat.

So what are the meanings of a Use By Date VS a Best Before Date?

Use By Dates and Best Before Dates are the next step in date labelling and are the responsibility of the food manufacturer.

Use By Date

In the simplest of terms a Use By Date is designed for the health and safety of a consumer and you should not eat the item after this date. Items are also not legally permitted to be sold after this date as they pose health risks.

Best Before Date

A Best Before Date however does not mean that you cannot eat the food after then; it simply means that the quality or taste may not be ‘at its best’ after the recommended date. This style of date-labelling is determined by the manufacturers recommendation of ‘optimum consumption’ to achieve the best quality product. According to Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), who are responsible for all date labelling definitions, ‘Food items are legally permitted to be sold after a Best Before Date and until they are no longer fit for human consumption’.

Legally the only food item that can have different date marking is bread which can be labelled with a baked on, or baked for date, if its shelf life is less than seven days. (FSANZ)

Foods that have a shelf life of two years or longer, e.g. some canned foods, do not need to be labelled with a Best Before Date. This is because it is difficult to provide a consumer with an accurate guide as to how long these foods will keep; as they may retain their quality for many years and are likely to be consumed well before they spoil. (FSANZ)

So next time you see a date label on your food have a look and see whether it is a Use by Date or a Best Before Date and then make informed decisions when discarding the items. We encourage you to educate everyone within your tribe about the differences and help make a contribution to minimising food waste.

As an industry we need to openly and collectively discuss how to improve consumer-based date labelling marketing campaigns and how to design packaging with better on-pack communications so that people make informed and conscious decisions before wasting food unnecessarily. Everyone has a role to play to help drive change that effectively minimises and/or prevents food waste.

Nerida Kelton MAIP

Executive Director, Australian Institute of Packaging (AIP)

Project Lead for the AIP Save Food Packaging Design Project for the Fight Food Waste Cooperative Research Centre

Thinking on the Box: Design On-pack Information Attributes to Influence Consumers’ Food Waste Behaviour

A study currently underway by the RMIT University, Australia, the Department of Management and Engineering, Link?ping University, Sweden and the Service Research Centre, Karlstad University, Sweden identifies that on-pack date-related labelling is one of the most direct information carriers used by food industry to communicate product shelf-life attributes to consumers. 

Through applying an activity theoretical lens to analyse the literature and empirical results, the researchers found that consumers’ interaction with date labels and storage information in their food consumption activity is highly influenced by their shifting motivations, the changing sociocultural contexts, and the dynamic interplay between the use of internal sensory perceptions and external on-pack date labels.

The study aims to systematically understand the interplay between on-pack date labels and consumer food waste behaviour and develop design implications and interventions to better support consumers in reducing food waste. Given the broad scope of the topic, this study specifically focuses on the consumer-food packaging interaction in household levels, the effects of date labelling and storage related packaging attributes in consumers’ purchasing behaviour are excluded in the study.

A design for sustainable behaviour perspective is taken as the main research perspective. Design for sustainable behavior is a relatively new field of inquiry aiming to reduce negative environmental and social impacts of products and services through influencing user behavior towards a more sustainable direction (Wever et al., 2008; Wever, 2012). Recent developments in this field attempt to understand the sustainability problems through both a synthetic and analytical approach, which can enable us to incorporate the factors such as the context of consumers’ food consumption, consumer behavior transition and evolution, and the emerging technological mediation into the on-pack date labelling and storage information evaluation and design process.

The Australian Institute of Packaging (AIP) will provide updated outcomes from this study as a part of their Fight Food Waste Cooperative Research Centre Save Food Packaging Guidelines project. https://fightfoodwastecrc.com.au/project/save-food-packaging-criteria-and-framework/