Many supermarkets are coming away from listing their products' 'best before' dates on their food, in an effort to help minimise food waste. While lots of people throw items in their fridges and cupboards away on or just after their best before dates, as they fear the items have gone-off or are no longer good to eat, the 'best before' dates are just that - the final date the item is at its highest-quality.
Best before dates differ from 'use by' dates, which specify the last day an item should be eaten for safe consumption - but certainly removing best before dates from products, especially fruit and vegetables, has upset customers who worry they're no longer able to buy products that have a good shelf-life, as they can't pick and choose the products with the longest dates.
Recently, many shoppers have noticed a new code appearing on various packaging for fruit and vegetables in the place the best before date used to be listed - but no-one seemed to know what the code meant. Until now.
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One savvy shopper has spoken to supermarket staff and has been able to crack the code - and they've given WalesOnline permission to share it!
Taking to the Extreme Couponing and Bargains UK group, the shopper explained: "If like me you have noticed supermarkets not putting best before dates on certain fresh items now, I have been told how the supermarket staff work out the dates."
Sharing a photo of grapes labelled 'D01' and a cucumber labelled 'D27,' the shopper continued: "Look at the code on the item without a best before date... the letter is the month so: A - January, B - February, C - March, D - April etc. Then the numbers are the date."
So, in the shopper's example, her grapes were best before April 1 and her cucumber is best before April 27.
We had a look in our local supermarket to see if understanding the code could help us - and it certainly did. Mangetout, for example, had various different codes on it - so we looked for the one with the highest number, to mean the latest best-before date.
We saw samphire marked D22 (meaning best before date April 22), fennel marked D24 (meaning April 24) and mangetout dated D27 (best before April 27). By knowing the best before dates we can make sure we use up the the items with the shortest dates first - and make sure we continue to purchase items with good best-before dates.
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