A variation of the recent thread about the expired medicine.
As i have mentioned in a previous thread, i own a general store and have recently been offered to buy “salvage” food, which is basically close-dated or expired foods.
Would be a different store than the one i have now, but thats not important.
I have a business associate who owns a chain of three food stores in Minnesota that almost exclusively sell expired food, and he makes a fortune!
My real question is, what is the upper limit of food being safe after expiration?
An example of what i have been offered to buy was yogurt dated for Dec. 5, 2014…how long after that date is it safe?
Dry cereal dated for Oct. 28, 2014
Chocolate bars that are a month past the best by date.
For starters, check with your health department, my health inspector has no problem with “best by” or “for best quality”, I think he’s okay with ‘sell by’ or ‘use by’ but I’m not sure off the top of my head. But, he has a problem with ‘expires on’ or ‘discard after’ if there are food items in our store that specifically say that they are expired or need to be discarded, we can’t sell them. It’s one thing for a food item to suggest the quality may be going downhill, but if the manufacturer says it’s not safe anymore, we can’t sell it.
The only thing I know off the top of my head (and this is personal, not according to the health guy) is that eggs are good for 30 days after the date on the carton.
There’s a website somewhere…
ETA, Chocolate, plain chocolate bars, I wouldn’t give them a second thought, they’ll be good for a LONG time. The most that’ll happen is they’ll get white ‘cracks’ on them as the cocoa butter comes out, but even that usually takes about a year.
ETA2: Turns out there are several sites. Google “How long past the expiration date” and you’ll come up with regular news articles on major outlets, webmd articles as well as sites devoted to this subject and since I don’t want to pick through them to see how they compare, I’ll let you figure it out.
Food expiration dates are the most misunderstood phenomena in the history of the western world.
The date means only one thing: That is the last date on which the seller of the product will guarantee its quality and freshness. It has absolutely nothing do do with safety, or with anything else. Once it is opened, it is completely meaningless. In fact, once it is purchased, it is completely meaningless.
Yogurt is one product I’m very cavalier with. I’ve eaten year-old yogurt that I’ve found hidden in the back of the fridge. Plenty of food goes bad by bacterial contamination. Yogurt is already stuffed with live bacteria, which maintain an environment that’s hostile to most spoilage bacteria. How could it possibly spoil? Would it turn into yogurt again?
Food expires when it smells bad, or when you can see it breaking down or something growing on it. Any date that may be printed on the package is irrelevant.
The real answer is that there is no single real answer.
Different foods last longer or shorter than others. Some foods are more reliant on controlled conditions like temp., humidity, light, air, etc. than others.
That’s compounded by different manufacturers using different criteria for deciding what date to put on each product - expiration dates are (most usually) an estimate. ‘Best by’ is even more vague.
Why don’t you ask your associate? He is making a fortune doing it, so he obviously knows.
I used to shop at a market that sold a lot of expired food. I learned to read the labels, because the expired food often wasn’t very good. I also asked my husband to never ever buy meat there again.
I’ve eaten yogurt after its best-by date. I’m sure it was safe to eat, but it was much sourer than fresher yogurt would have been, and the consistency wasn’t as good.
I had some dried fruit (from that store, and without a best-by date) that had fermented, but not in a good way. I threw that out shortly after opening the plastic bag. I wrote to the manufacturer, and learned:
they don’t list an explicit date because how long it keeps is very dependent on the conditions in which it is stored. If it is kept cool, it keeps pretty-much forever. The manufacturer provided best-by instruction to VENDORS in a coded way, based on what part of the country they were in and whether they refrigerated the product. This box had not been kept cool.
the box I purchased had been reported to the manufacturer as “past (coded, non-customer-readable) expiration date, destroyed” and the manufactorer had reimbursed the shop-owner for the unsalable goods. It had them presumably “fallen off a truck” and ended up in my local market.
So I would question the legal status of food that is intentionally sold to retailers past it’s expiration date. The manufacturer of that food, which has an interest in maintaining its repuation, may be cheated in such a deal
I work for an NPO which deals with the Food Stamps and AID office and we get a lot of questions like this.
When you’re dealing with expiration dates on foods like dehydrated potatoes and dehydrated milk, you are really asking about quality rather than safety.
I have used dehydrated potatoes way past the expire date and they’re fine, but you can tell the taste is effected somewhat. Of course you can cover that up fine and if they are used in a recipe it’s usually a non-issue.
While that’s my general rule of thumb, it’s not entirely correct. There are plenty of foodborne pathogens that can make you sick before they grow into an obvious slime or make the food smell spoiled. For example, we all know that bulging cans are very bad news. However, contaminated cans could still make you sick before they start obviously bulging or spoiling, particularly with pathogens like Botulism that produce toxins that are dangerous at very low doses.
Other than infant formula, or any specific state regulations, food dating is for marketing purposes by the manufacturer. It’s not about the health and safety of the consumer.
Well in that case, you’re just screwed, because the printed expiration dates won’t give you any indication of botulism either. If it’s canned properly, then you won’t have any botulism no matter how long the can remains sealed, and if it’s not canned properly, then it’ll be bad long before the printed expiration date.
If you can’t do anything about a problem, there’s no point in worrying about it.
You can inspect cans as you prepare to open them for soundness. I do that, although I ignore minor dents in cans of stuff that shouldn’t be very hospitable to botulism. (Like tomato sauce, which is quite sour.) But if a can is dented along a seam, I will toss it.
Of course, that doesn’t say anything about the expiration date. In general, foods often taste worse if they’ve been stored too long. I don’t toss something if it’s a week past the “best by” date, but when I find something that’s very long in the tooth hiding in my fridge or cupboard, I generally do toss it.
I knew you could eat yogurt past the sell date, but I had no clue you could keep it that long. I would have assumed it would spoil after a couple weeks or something like that.
No, but if I see a green mold growing on it (and I have), I will not eat it.
I once saw a 510 g bottle of PEG 3350 on the drugstore shelf for $7 (usual price $25) and I asked a pharmacist what gives. It is essentially inert I thought. Yes, he agreed, but the sell-by date was fast approaching and they would have to take it off the shelf.
All pharmaceuticals sold in Quebec have, by law, a discard date of one year. My doctor told me that the US Army had studied this and concluded that antibiotics were still safe and effective for 15 years. He was giving me an antibiotic that he wanted me to carry whenever I traveled, in case of a bladder infection, of which I have had several.
Right. Cans are sealed and essentially sterilized as part of the canning process. They’re not going to spoil due to bacterial action, unless the canning was bungled, or the can has been unsealed in some fashion.
However, chemical reactions will continue in the cans, and can eventually affect food quality for the worse.