Last week I threw away a can of black beans. The “best by” date said March 2025, and it was May. Into the trash it went. No weird smell. No dents. No bulging lid. Just a date on a label that I treated like gospel even though — and I cannot stress this enough — nobody in the federal government required that date to be there, nobody checked the math, and the beans were almost certainly fine.
I am, statistically speaking, just like you. A report from the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated that 9 out of 10 Americans have thrown away perfectly edible food because of confusing date labels. Nine out of ten. That means nearly all of us are regularly tossing good food into the garbage based on a system that doesn’t mean what we think it means.
So let’s talk about what those dates actually are, who put them there, why they exist, and what you should do instead of blindly obeying them.
There Is No Federal Law Requiring Dates On Your Food
This is the part that shocks people. The USDA, the FDA, Harvard Law School — they all say the same thing. There is no national law in the United States that requires date labels on food products. The only exception is infant formula. That’s it. Everything else — the yogurt in your fridge, the cereal in your pantry, the chicken in your freezer — those dates are voluntary. The manufacturer put them there because they wanted to, not because anyone made them.
And here’s what really gets me: the FDA has said that manufacturers aren’t even required to explain how they came up with the date. They don’t need FDA approval for it. They just… pick one. As long as the information isn’t outright false or misleading, it’s fine. That’s the bar. A company can slap a date on a jar of peanut butter and there’s no regulatory body double-checking whether that date reflects reality.
“Best By” Does Not Mean “Bad After”
There are four common date labels you’ll see in a grocery store, and none of them mean what most people think. “Best if Used By” is about flavor and quality — the manufacturer’s guess at when the product tastes best. “Sell By” is a note for the store, telling staff when to rotate stock. It’s an inventory tool, not a safety warning. “Use By” is the manufacturer’s recommendation for peak quality. And “Freeze By” is a suggestion for when to freeze something to keep it at its best.
Notice what’s missing from all of those? The word “safety.” Food safety experts have been saying for years that these labels have nothing to do with whether food will make you sick. They’re about quality. They’re about whether your crackers are at maximum crispiness. That’s a very different thing from “this will give you food poisoning.”
True expiration dates — the ones actually marked “Expires On” — are extremely rare in the U.S. When you see one, pay attention. But that “best by” date on your mustard? That’s a suggestion, not a death sentence.
The Dates Are Conservative On Purpose
Here’s something that makes total sense once you hear it: food companies have every reason to make those dates earlier than necessary. Andy Harig, a vice president at FMI (a food industry association), told reporters that sell-by dates are more about protecting the brand than protecting you. Companies want you to eat their product when it tastes the absolute best, because that’s what makes you buy it again.
Think about it from their side. If you eat a bag of chips two months past the best-by date and they’re a little stale, you might think “these chips aren’t great” and switch brands. The company would rather you throw them out and buy a fresh bag. The date isn’t a warning — it’s marketing.
Feeding America’s Inland Empire chapter put it bluntly: these dates are “the manufacturer’s best guess on the item’s freshness, which is often times very conservative.” That conservatism isn’t about your safety. It’s about their bottom line.
State Laws Are A Total Mess
Since there’s no federal standard, every state does its own thing. And the results are wild. Emily Broad Leib, who directs the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, has been tracking this chaos for years.
In Montana, milk has to be sold within 12 days of pasteurization. Cross the border into Idaho, and that same milk — pasteurized the exact same way, with the same science behind it — can be sold for 23 days. The milk didn’t change. The state line did. One state requires date labels on eggs. Another only requires them on cream. Texas says shellfish needs a date. Utah says it doesn’t. The patchwork is so random and inconsistent that it basically proves these dates aren’t grounded in food science. If they were, the rules would be the same everywhere.
This Confusion Costs Us Billions
In 2023, nearly 74 million tons of food were wasted in the United States — about 31% of everything produced in the country. The nonprofit ReFED estimates that date label confusion alone causes Americans to throw away roughly 3 billion pounds of food every year. That’s $7 billion worth of food, gone.
At the household level, the average American family tosses about 290 pounds of food per year — around $1,825 worth. Some of that is genuinely spoiled food. But a huge chunk of it is stuff that was still perfectly fine to eat. People looked at a date, felt uneasy, and threw it out. That’s an expensive gut reaction.
And it’s not just at home. Grocery stores pull items from shelves as dates approach. Suppliers can’t move products that are close to their printed dates. Restaurants toss ingredients. The confusion ripples through the entire food chain, and everyone pays for it — including the roughly 18 million American households that are food insecure.
What Actually Tells You If Food Is Safe
Carla Schwan, a food safety specialist at the University of Georgia, keeps it simple: “If it looks fine, smells fine and tastes fine, it’s probably fine.” That’s not reckless advice from some random person online — that’s a professor and food safety specialist at a major research university.
Your senses are surprisingly good at detecting spoilage. Off smells, weird textures, funky colors, visible mold — those are real indicators. A printed date is not. Pasteurized milk can last three to seven days past its sell-by date if you’ve kept it at or below 40°F. Eggs are safe for three to five weeks after purchase, even after the sell-by date has passed. Canned goods? Anywhere from one to five years on the shelf if stored properly. Dried pasta and rice can last about two years.
There are a few exceptions where you should be more careful. Deli meat, raw fish, unpasteurized dairy, and anything from the prepared foods section — those are higher risk. Pay closer attention to dates on those items, and when in doubt, toss them. But that jar of salsa with yesterday’s best-by date? Give it a sniff. It’s almost certainly fine.
California Is About To Change The Game
Starting July 1, 2026, California will become the first state to ban sell-by dates on food products. The idea is straightforward: sell-by dates were never meant for consumers in the first place, so putting them on consumer-facing packaging just creates confusion. When California — the largest state economy in the country — makes a move like this, other states tend to follow. It won’t fix everything overnight, but it’s the first real attempt to address the labeling mess at a legislative level.
Separately, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has estimated that standardizing date labels nationally would save $3.8 billion per year, with the majority of that going back into consumers’ pockets. That’s not a small number.
What You Can Do Right Now
Download the USDA’s FoodKeeper app. It’s free, and it gives you actual storage timelines for hundreds of products — timelines that are often way longer than what’s printed on the package. Kate Garrett, who runs supply chain operations at Feeding San Diego, says the app sometimes shows products are safe to consume up to five years past their printed date. Her organization distributed over 33 million pounds of food last year, and 91% of it was rescued food that would have otherwise been thrown away.
Beyond the app, just shift how you think about those dates. Stop treating “best by” as a cliff your food falls off. Start using your eyes and nose before you use the trash can. Check how you’re storing things — proper refrigeration and handling extend the life of almost everything. And if you have canned goods pushed to the back of your pantry that are past their dates, pull them out and actually look at them before you throw them away.
We’ve been trained to trust a printed date over our own senses, and that training has cost us billions of dollars and millions of tons of wasted food. The dates were never about safety. They were always about quality — and often, they were about sales. Once you know that, it’s hard to look at your pantry the same way.
