The “Sell by” date on your perishable groceries is meaningless to you, the consumer. But starting next year, California will see a more useful label that says “Use by,” or in some cases, “Best if used (or frozen) by.”

If you rely on your perishable groceries’ “Sell by” or "Best by" date on the packaging, realize that date has absolutely nothing to do with whether that food is safe to eat. The “Sell by” date is merely an inventory management metric for manufacturers and retailers to measure the date on which they want that product off their shelves, and "Best by" and other dates have nothing to do with when spoilage might set in. As the USDA explains, “There are no uniform or universally accepted descriptions used on food labels for open dating in the United States. As a result, there are a wide variety of phrases used on labels to describe quality dates.”

That’s going to change, or at least, it is in California. The Chronicle reports that a new California law will finally create consistent guidelines for grocery freshness labeling, based on how long the food is safe for a consumer to eat. These days, food is generally not labeled based on the date it is safe to eat, with the notable expectation being baby formula.    

“Sell-by dating is normally intended for use in the store and for the store to know when to sell that product by,” US Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service public affairs specialist Meredith Carothers told the Chronicle. She added that the “Sell by” date only determines the “best quality for selling it in the store, not best quality in general.”

Thanks to a new law called AB 660, your California groceries will have new labels starting in July 2026 . Instead of a “Sell by” date, your perishable items will instead have a “Use by” date, but in some cases, a “Best if used (or frozen) by.” While you may currently see a “Use by” date on some groceries in stores, that date does not necessarily reflect the best by which to eat that food.

Until these new labeling laws go into effect, there is an excellent resource the Chronicle points out called the FoodKeeper app. It works as both a desktop browser page and a mobile app, and explains how long you can expect various produce and dairy items to stay safe to eat after you've bought them.

There are no federal guidelines for labeling food for consumers, and California will be the first state to even have statewide standards. But since California is such a large and lucrative grocery market, industry analysts wonder if food manufacturers nationwide will simply adopt those standards to ensure they can sell their food here.

“Ideally, we want a national date labeling standard, and California's large economy will put pressure on food manufacturers that we hope will lead to a national law,” National Resources Defense Council program advocate told the Chronicle.

The point of this change is not only to keep customers safe, but also to limit food waste by discouraging discarding food too early. The FDA notes that between 30%-40% of food in America gets thrown away, often too early while it’s still quite edible, because consumers misunderstand the food date labels.

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Image: Joe Kukra, SFist