California scraps 'sell by' dates — the label most people read as a deadline was never a safety test

Food & Farming 3 min 80 sources

A new California law that took effect July 1 bans consumer-facing 'sell by' dates on packaged food, standardises the rest, and targets a simple, costly confusion: shoppers throwing out good food because they misread a manufacturer's freshness guess as a safety rule.

Key takeaways

California's new law bans consumer "sell by" dates and standardises food labels, because most date stamps are quality guesses, not safety tests — and the confusion drives close to a fifth of US food waste.
Coffee prices may ease as bean costs fall, and the US moved to cut fertilizer costs by suspending some Morocco phosphate duties and funding domestic production.
Drought in India, food shortages in Papua New Guinea, and a record-warm June ocean show the climate pressure building on where and how reliably food gets grown.

The most consequential thing to happen in the food world this week is a label change. On July 1, a California law took effect that bans “sell by” dates on packaged food sold to consumers and forces the rest of the country’s messy date stamps into two plain phrases. [42] It is the first US state to do it, and it targets a confusion that quietly wastes an enormous amount of food.

The label that means almost nothing

Here is the odd fact underneath the news: most dates stamped on food are not safety dates. “Sell by” is an instruction to the shop, not the shopper — it tells a stocker when to rotate the shelf. “Best by” is the manufacturer’s guess at peak quality, not the moment food turns unsafe. There is no federal rule setting what any of these phrases mean, so brands print whatever they like. [42]

Shoppers read all of it as a deadline. The result: the US Food and Drug Administration estimates date-label confusion drives close to 20% of the country’s food waste. [42] California’s own recycling agency reckons the state throws away roughly 2.5 billion meals worth of unspoiled food a year, and that organic waste makes up nearly half of what Californians send to landfill. [42]

California’s fix, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2024 and live as of this week, is to standardise the language. Quality dates must read “best if used by.” Safety dates — the small set of foods that genuinely go dangerous — must read “use by.” Consumer-facing “sell by” stamps are gone; shops can keep a coded version for stock rotation. [42] New York’s legislature has passed a near-identical bill now awaiting the governor’s signature, and five more states have drafts in play. [42]

Prices: coffee eases, fertilizer gets a nudge

Nestlé signalled this week it could lower coffee prices as the cost of beans falls back from recent highs — the first hint of relief after a long climb driven by poor harvests in the big growing countries. [7] Coffee is a commodity, meaning it is traded as an interchangeable bulk good priced on a world market, so a good crop in one country can ease the price on every shelf.

On fertilizer, the US moved to suspend some duties on phosphate imports from Morocco, a step aimed at pulling down input costs for American farmers. [31] It lands the same week the USDA announced $500 million to expand domestic fertilizer production. [2] Fertilizer is one of a farmer’s largest costs, and it is bought months ahead — so cheaper prices now feed through to grocery shelves slowly, over a season or more.

Farming under stress

India recorded its driest June in over a decade, raising worry about the monsoon-fed planting that underpins much of the country’s food. [14] In the Pacific, Papua New Guinea is facing severe food shortages as an early El Niño brings frost to the highlands and drought elsewhere. [18] And the world’s oceans hit a record surface temperature for June, the kind of background heating that reshapes where fish move and how reliably crops set. [71]

Closer to the market, New York launched a tariff-relief program for its farmers, cushioning growers caught by trade friction. [6] And President Trump signed an executive order backing “regenerative agriculture” — a directive to federal agencies to promote soil-building practices and reduce pesticide use, though reporting notes it adds no new money. [40]

One under-covered thread ties several of these together: a French court fight in which dairy giant Lactalis is suing to block Nutri-Score, the front-of-pack nutrition label. [61] Between that case and California’s date-label overhaul, the same quiet question keeps surfacing — who decides what a label is allowed to tell you, and what happens when the label answers a different question than the one you’re asking.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

The number you're reading isn't answering the question you're asking

A label looks like a fact, but every measurement was built to answer one particular question — and the trouble starts when you use its answer for a different one.

A date that was never about you

Look at the “sell by” date on a carton of milk. It feels like a message to you: this is when the milk goes bad. It isn’t. It was written for the person stocking the shelf, telling them when to pull the carton and put a fresher one out. The milk is usually fine for days after. You are reading a note that was addressed to someone else, and acting on it as if it were addressed to you.

That small misreading is not small in total. When enough people treat a stocking instruction as a safety deadline, they throw away good food — a lot of it. The date didn’t lie. It just answered a different question than the one the shopper was asking. The shopper asked “is this safe to eat?” The stamp answered “when should the store rotate stock?” Two different questions, one number, and the gap between them ends up in the bin.

Every measurement has a question baked into it

Here is the pattern, and it runs far past milk. Every number you meet was produced to answer some specific question. A test score answers “how did this student do on this test on this day” — not “how smart is this child.” A speedometer answers “how fast are the wheels turning” — not “how fast are you actually moving over the ground,” which is why it reads wrong on worn tyres. A country’s economic output answers “how much was bought and sold” — not “how well are people living.”

The measurement is honest about its own question. The mistake is ours: we grab the answer and carry it to a question it was never built for. And because the number looks like a plain fact — clean, printed, official — we don’t notice the swap. A “best by” date isn’t marked “this is a quality guess, not a safety test.” It just sits there, looking like the truth about the food.

Why the swap is so easy to make

A number arrives stripped of its origins. You see the “4.2 stars,” not the handful of reviews it’s averaged from. You see the “sell by 3 July,” not the fact that it’s a manufacturer’s cautious estimate of peak flavour. The context that would tell you which question the number answers has been filed off, and what’s left looks universal — usable for anything.

So we use it for anything. The store’s date becomes the shopper’s deadline. The test built to rank one class becomes the measure of a whole child. And the more official the number looks, the more we trust it for questions it can’t touch. Precision gets mistaken for relevance. A very exact answer to the wrong question still feels like an answer.

Who set the question, and who pays for the gap

Someone chose what each number would measure, and that choice quietly serves someone. A “sell by” date is set cautiously because a brand would rather you toss a good carton and buy another than eat a slightly-off one and blame them. The caution isn’t a lie — but it isn’t neutral either. It tilts toward the maker’s interest, and the cost of the tilt lands on the shopper’s grocery bill and in the landfill.

This is the part that’s easy to miss. The gap between the question a number answers and the question you’re asking is rarely random. It usually leans in a direction. The credit score built to protect the lender. The calorie count on the pack, measured under lab conditions you’ll never match. Ask not just “what question does this answer,” but “who chose that question, and does the gap happen to fall in their favour.”

The habit worth keeping

You can’t check the origin of every number you meet — nobody has time to interrogate a milk carton. But you can hold the printed ones a little more loosely. Before you act on a figure, ask the quiet question: what was this actually built to measure, and is that the thing I care about right now?

California just spent a law forcing food labels to say which question they’re answering — “best if used by” for quality, “use by” for genuine safety — because the old stamps let one number pretend to answer both. That’s the whole move, made public: separate the questions the number was quietly blurring. You are inside this too. Every day you read scores, ratings, prices, and dates, and quietly borrow each one to answer a question it was never asked. Seeing that doesn’t make you distrust the numbers. It makes you ask them the right question first.

03 · Lab · your turn

Clear the Fridge

Decide keep-or-bin from printed food dates, then see how a stamp answering the wrong question turns good food into waste.

04 · Hope · carry this

It turns out a lot of the food we throw away was never spoiled — only mislabelled, and that's a fixable mistake. California just proved that a clearer word on a carton can quietly save billions of meals, no new invention required.