Best-before date: Superfluous, profitable, or essential?
Best-before date: Superfluous, profitable, or essential?
In its current form, the best-before date provides information that mistakenly leads consumers to waste food. Reform would be beneficial, but what form could it take?
For many years, consumers, industry, and producers have been concerned with the best-before date. Every year in Germany, around 80 to 100 kilograms of food per person are thrown away, even though they are often still edible after the best-before date has expired. This is a compelling reason to seek and discuss a solution to this problem. The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF), for example, supports initiatives for dual labeling on food products. The idea is that all products should have two dates:
One for consumers, indicating how long the product is edible or drinkable.
Another for retailers, showing how long the product may be offered in stores.
The aim of this regulation is to reduce food waste and thus lessen the impact on the environment. The best-before date is intended to protect consumers from consuming food that is no longer edible. The problem is that most products have a long shelf life and lose little quality when stored correctly. Double labeling would provide information on how long the product is still edible after it has passed its sell-by date.
But would it help to waste less food? Looking at countries such as the UK and Japan, where products are already double-labeled, a trend can be discerned. In Japan, rising food prices prompted many shoppers to choose “inferior” or “shorter-shelf-life” foods, provided they were cheaper and did not compromise on taste. This could be deduced from the sales figures of some retailers, which included a large range of “soon-to-expire” products. Due to rising food prices, the Maruyasu supermarket chain recorded a 25% increase over the previous year.1 Personal finances are the trigger for buying “soon-to-expire” products. However, the result is satisfactory, as more food has found a consumer and did not end up in the trash.
The best-before date is outdated and needs to be revised in order to create a situation that benefits both the environment and people, based on the latest findings on food waste. However, dual labeling is probably only part of the solution and represents one way of bringing “inferior” or “soon-to-expire” food to consumers.
The European Union is discussing various approaches to reforming food labeling. One possibility is to abolish the best-before date on long-life foods such as pasta, rice, or coffee. Alternatively, only the use-by date could be retained. Another option would be to make relevant information clearer for consumers by using pictograms.
1 https://sumikai.com/nachrichten-aus-japan/verbraucher-in-japan-greifen-vermehrt-zu-abgelaufenen-und-minderwertigen-lebensmitteln-336795/+
2 Die Abschaffung des MHDs könnte also sinnvoll sein, um die Lebensmittelverschwendung zu reduzieren und einen nachhaltigeren Konsum zu fördern1.
3 https://utopia.de/news/mindesthaltbarkeitsdatum-abschaffen-warum-das-sinnvoll-ist/
4 https://www.chip.de/news/Mindesthaltbarkeitsdatum-abschaffen-Ist-das-wirklich-sinnvoll_184666937.html
5 https://www.vzhh.de/themen/lebensmittel-ernaehrung/verschwendung-von-lebensmitteln/mindesthaltbarkeitsdatum-ist-das-noch-gut-muss-es-weg
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