You’ve been there, right? The food smells fine and looks perfectly edible, but the date on the container is long past. Is it safe to eat? How can I be sure? Better toss it, just in case. 

You’re not alone. 

Many consumers believe that you shouldn’t eat a food once it’s past the “best by” date that’s printed on its label. But, more often than not, that’s just the manufacturer’s estimate of when a food starts to decline from its optimal quality. 

What about the “sell by” date that many foods carry? That one’s not even meant for you. It’s there to help retailers rotate their stock.

Neither date means that the food will be unsafe to eat the next day. 

Yet a 2025 survey found that 88% of consumers sometimes discarded foods when the date on the package’s label was approaching.

In other words, food that is safe and could be used or donated is ending up in the dumpster because people are confused about whether it’s still good.

The cost, both to our pocketbooks and to the entire food system, is enormous. 

Around 30% of the food in the US food supply goes unsold or uneaten. Much of it ends up in landfills or is incinerated. On average, every one of us spends more than $750 a year on food that is ultimately wasted.

In 2024, date-label confusion alone led us to toss more than 3.5 million tons of food, at a cost of nearly $20 billion.

And throwing out perfectly good food instead of donating it while roughly 18 million American households are food insecure is a national tragedy.

Learn more about improved food date labeling at cspi.org/cspi-news/FoodDateLabels.

What fuels the confusion? Except for infant formula, the federal government doesn’t regulate on-package food date labels. The result: a haphazard patchwork of state regulation and voluntary labels.

The fix is simple: Congress needs to pass the bipartisan Food Date Labeling Act, which would establish standardized language for food labels that better distinguishes between quality and safety.

For example, if a manufacturer wanted to tell shoppers about quality, the date notice would say “best if used by.” And if a manufacturer wanted to tell shoppers about safety, the date notice would say “use by.” (We think “expires on” would be even clearer.)

We’ll keep fighting for this and other commonsense measures to protect your health, strengthen charitable food programs, and keep your money in your pocket...and out of the trash.