Dates: Expiration vs. Sell By
Itâs that time of year again! Time for my countryâs national harvest festival which, since most people donât grow their own food anymore, means my store is...er...a touch busy as folks prepare to celebrate the fact that hey! Theyâre not starving! Thatâs a good thing, right?
...maybe less so if youâre an inverted retail worker. So I have, in traditional fashion, gone scampering into the bakery to help with the Packaging of the Pies! (And rolls and cheese cake and...okay, a lot of things, but mainly pies!) And in doing so, I have had cause to remember something that I keep meaning to address and yet never have:
Many people do not understand the difference between an expiration date and a sell by date.
Is this important? You bet itâs important! If you come into the store on, say, the 20th, hoping to get a pumpkin pie in advance, like a sensible bean, and not deal with Day Before Thanksgiving Grocery Store occurrences, but you look at all of the pies with a label date of the 22nd , you may well think âAw, shucks! Too early! That pie wonât last until Thanksgiving!â and leave without it and be forced to come back and deal withâŚâŚ.THE GREAT PIE RUSH!
Dun dun dun!
Thing is, if the date on that label is a âsell byâ date rather than an âexpirationâ date, you will have just wasted your time, your sanity, and possibly a bit on hospital bills depending on whether you get caught up in a fight in the parking lot*.
The difference between these two concepts is pretty simple, really. It goes like this:
Expiration Date: If you donât eat the item before this date, bad things might happen to the taste, texture, Â nutritional content, and, if left long enough, it might crawl out of your fridge and make a break for freedom.
Sell By Date: The store must sell the item by this date in order for you, the consumer, to have a reasonable time in which to eat it.
In short, no, we do not expect you to be able to eat that dozen cookies by tomorrow. We have to sell those dozen cookies by tomorrow in order for them to be edible for a reasonable amount of time, generally around one week.
As you see, itâs an important distinction! Iâve known plenty of people to complain that they love this-or-that product, but golly gosh, with those expiration dates they could never eat it all in time! STOP DEPRIVING YOURSELVES OF YOUR TASTY BAKED GOODS! BUY THE THING THAT MUST BE SOLD BY DAY AFTER TOMORROW!
...also, many baked goods freeze perfectly well. Tested and proven fact.
Now, I will allow that sometimes things go weird. But that is a very, very, very rare occurrence - as in, Iâm aware of it having happened once in seven years of employment - and tends to leave everyone involved scratching their heads and looking at each other in utter bewilderment going â....how is that even possible? A chocolate cookie shouldnât be mobile enough to run a marathon for at least a month!â And on the very off chance something like that does go on, weâre good with our refunds.
The point still stands.
* parking lot fights are rare and to the best of my knowledge none of them at my store have ever escalated to hospital visits. I mainly put that there for dramatic effect.














