A best before date tells you when a food will start losing its peak quality, not when it becomes unsafe to eat. It’s a manufacturer’s estimate of how long a product will taste, look, and feel its best under normal storage conditions. Food past its best before date is often perfectly fine to eat, though it may have lost some flavor, texture, or nutritional value.
This distinction matters more than most people realize. Roughly 30% of the U.S. food supply is wasted at the retail and consumer level, and a major driver is people throwing away food that’s still safe because they misread the date on the label.
Best Before vs. Use By: The Key Difference
Best before dates are about quality. Use by dates are about safety. These two labels serve completely different purposes, but most packaging doesn’t explain the difference, and many people treat them as interchangeable.
A best before date (sometimes printed as “BBE,” meaning best before end) signals when a product’s flavor, texture, or appearance may begin to decline. A can of soup three months past its best before date might taste slightly different, but it hasn’t become dangerous. A use by date, on the other hand, appears on perishable foods like fresh meat, ready-to-eat salads, and dairy where bacterial growth poses a real health risk after a certain point. You should take use by dates seriously.
One product where the date is non-negotiable: infant formula. The FDA requires a “use by” date on formula because the manufacturer can only guarantee the nutrient content and quality up to that point. A baby relying on formula for complete nutrition could miss out on critical nutrients from an expired product.
Why the Labels Are So Confusing
In the United States, there is no federal law requiring manufacturers to use a specific date label phrase on most foods. Companies voluntarily choose from a grab bag of terms: “Sell By,” “Best By,” “Use By,” “Best if Used By,” and others. Both the FDA and USDA recommend that manufacturers use “Best if Used By” as a standard quality phrase, but current regulations don’t prohibit other wording as long as it’s not misleading. The result is a patchwork of labels that leaves shoppers guessing.
A “Sell By” date, for instance, is aimed at retailers, not consumers. It tells the store how long to display the product. A “Best By” or “Best if Used By” date is the manufacturer’s quality recommendation. None of these phrases carry the same safety weight as a true “Use By” date on a perishable item. But when you’re standing in your kitchen holding a carton of broth that says “Best By” last Tuesday, the instinct is to toss it.
Legislation is slowly catching up. The Food Date Labeling Act of 2025, introduced in the U.S. Senate, would standardize labels into two clear categories: a “quality date” phrase for non-safety dates and a “discard date” phrase for foods that genuinely need to be thrown out. It would also require a federal consumer education campaign to explain the difference. The bill hasn’t passed yet, but it reflects growing recognition that current labeling wastes enormous amounts of food.
How Long Food Actually Lasts
Many foods remain safe well beyond their printed dates, especially when stored properly. Here are some practical timeframes:
- Eggs: Fresh shell eggs kept refrigerated at 45°F or below are safe to eat four to five weeks beyond the pack date on the carton. The expiration date printed on the carton can’t exceed 30 days after packing for USDA-graded eggs, but the eggs themselves last longer than that date suggests.
- Canned goods (high-acid): Foods like tomatoes and fruits maintain best quality for 12 to 18 months. After that, taste and texture may shift, but the food stays safe as long as the can is intact.
- Canned goods (low-acid): Meats, beans, and vegetables in cans keep their quality for two to five years.
- Frozen food: Food stored at 0°F stays safe indefinitely. Freezing doesn’t kill most bacteria, but it stops them from growing entirely. The tradeoff is quality: tenderness, flavor, juiciness, and color all degrade the longer something stays frozen. A chicken breast frozen for six months is safe but won’t taste as good as one frozen for two weeks.
The FDA puts it plainly: a “use by” date on most products is the manufacturer’s recommendation for best flavor or quality, not a food safety deadline. At some point after that date, taste, color, texture, or nutrient content may change, but the product can still be wholesome and safe.
When to Actually Throw Food Away
Dates aside, your senses are a useful first check for spoilage. Look for rising air bubbles or gas in liquids, leaking or bulging containers, foam, foul or sour odors, unnatural discoloration, sliminess on surfaces, dried residue at the top of jars, or any mold growth (white, blue, black, or green) on the food or under the lid.
There’s an important caveat here. The bacteria that cause foodborne illness, the dangerous ones, are often invisible. You can’t see, smell, or taste them. The signs listed above indicate spoilage organisms, which make food unpleasant but aren’t always the same microbes that make you sick. This is why use by dates on perishable foods like raw chicken or deli meats matter even when the food still looks and smells normal. For shelf-stable products like canned goods, pasta, or crackers, sensory checks work well as a guide.
How Storage Changes Everything
A best before date assumes you’ve stored the product under reasonable conditions. Leave a jar of peanut butter in a hot car for a week and the printed date becomes meaningless. The same product kept in a cool, dark pantry might outlast its date by months.
Freezing is the most powerful tool for extending food life past any printed date. If you know you won’t use something before its best before date, freezing it while it’s still fresh essentially pauses the clock on quality loss. Bread, meat, cooked grains, and most prepared foods freeze well. The date on the package becomes irrelevant once the food is frozen at 0°F, though you’ll want to use it within a few months for the best eating experience.
Refrigeration temperature matters too. Your fridge should sit at or below 40°F. Every degree above that accelerates bacterial growth and quality decline, making printed dates less reliable. A simple fridge thermometer is one of the cheapest ways to make your food last longer and stay safer.