Best-By vs Use-By vs Sell-By: What Each Date Means

The US date labeling system is broken, and it's costing you real money

Here is something that will strike most people as implausible: the United States federal government does not regulate the dates printed on the food you sell. Not "Best By," not "Use By," not "Sell By." None of them. The federal government has exactly one opinion about date labels on food, and that opinion is about infant formula. Under 21 CFR 107.20, infant formula must carry a "Use By" date and selling formula past that date is illegal, because infants depend on precise nutritional profiles and formula nutrient content degrades over time. That is the entire universe of federal date labeling law. Everything else you see stamped on a package is, legally speaking, a manufacturer's suggestion.

This is not a minor regulatory gap. This is the single largest driver of edible food being thrown into dumpsters by consumers and retailers in the richest country on earth, and the reason your staff has to deal with a customer holding up a perfectly good yogurt and demanding to know why you're "selling expired food" when the product has weeks of safe consumption left. The system, such as it is, manages to simultaneously confuse consumers, create legal liability for retailers in some states but not others, and generate roughly $218 billion in annual food waste. It is, by almost any measure, a policy failure — but it's the policy failure you have to operate inside, so let's talk about what these dates actually mean and what you can do about it.

What the three date types are really telling you

The phrase "Best If Used By" (or "Best By") is a quality indicator. The manufacturer ran shelf-life testing — or, let's be honest, in many cases made an educated guess based on similar products — and concluded that the product will taste, look, and feel the way they intended up to that date. After it passes, the food is still safe to eat in the overwhelming majority of cases. Your box of crackers might be slightly less crispy. Your salad dressing might separate a bit more readily. Nobody is getting sick from a can of beans that is two months past its Best By date (the can of beans was probably fine for years past that date, but the manufacturer has neither the incentive nor the legal obligation to tell you that).

"Use By" is the closest thing to a safety-oriented date in the system, and it's found on products more susceptible to microbial growth — dairy, deli meats, refrigerated ready-to-eat items. Even here, though, the FDA does not mandate this label on anything other than infant formula. The manufacturer determines the date based on their own internal testing, and there is no federal requirement for how that testing should be conducted, what methodology should be used, or what margin of safety should be applied. Two manufacturers producing functionally identical products can arrive at meaningfully different Use By dates, and both are equally "correct" in the eyes of federal regulators, because federal regulators are not looking.

"Sell By" is the date that creates the most consumer confusion relative to its actual meaning, which is: it's not for consumers at all. It's an inventory rotation signal for store staff, telling them when to pull or rotate product so that the customer still has a reasonable window of quality after purchase. The Sell By date on a gallon of milk does not mean the milk becomes unsafe on that date. It means the store should ideally have sold it by then. The milk is typically fine for another week in your refrigerator. But consumers — understandably, given the total absence of a coherent system — read "Sell By April 3" and throw the milk away on April 4, which is roughly the equivalent of throwing money into a shredder because the calendar told you to.

There is also a "Freeze By" date that occasionally appears on packaging, suggesting when you should freeze the product to maintain quality. It carries no legal weight anywhere and exists mostly as a helpful nudge from manufacturers who know their product will last much longer frozen. It is the least problematic date label, which is to say it is the one that the fewest people pay attention to.

Fifty states, fifty different answers to the same question

Because the federal government has largely declined to regulate this space, states have stepped in — and they have stepped in with the coordination and consistency you would expect from fifty independent legislative bodies operating without a shared framework, which is to say: almost none.

At one end of the spectrum, you have Montana, which prohibits the sale of products past any printed date label, full stop. It does not matter whether the label says "Best By" or "Sell By" or "Enjoy By" — once that date passes, the product comes off the shelf. Massachusetts takes a similar approach for perishable and semi-perishable foods: if there's a date on the package, you cannot sell it past that date, and products must be pulled. Maryland requires sell-by dates on milk and dairy products specifically and prohibits sale after those dates, but is less prescriptive about other product categories.

In the middle, you have states that require date labels on specific products but don't necessarily ban post-date sales across the board. New York requires sell-by or use-by dates on milk and other perishables. Pennsylvania mandates open dating on milk and prohibits sale past the sell-by date. California requires date labels on eggs — specifically, a sell-by date no more than 30 days after packing — but does not impose broad dating requirements on other product categories. Connecticut requires dating on perishable packaged foods.

And then at the other end, you have states like Texas, Georgia, and Ohio, which have minimal or no date labeling requirements for most food products. Texas doesn't regulate date labels at all for the vast majority of food items (shellfish being a notable exception, because shellfish is always a notable exception in food safety regulation). Georgia has no general date labeling mandate. Ohio does not require open dating beyond whatever federal requirements exist, which, as we've established, barely exist.

Eggs deserve their own brief digression because the regulatory situation is characteristically absurd. The USDA requires a pack date on USDA-graded eggs — expressed as a three-digit Julian date code, because apparently making dates human-readable would have been too straightforward — and if a sell-by date is used, it cannot exceed 30 days from the pack date. But this only applies to USDA-graded eggs. State-inspected eggs follow state rules, and state rules vary dramatically. Some states require expiration dates on eggs. Others don't require any date at all. The consumer standing in the egg aisle has no way to know which regulatory regime produced the date on the carton they're holding, and honestly, neither do most of the people stocking those cartons.

The practical consequence of all of this for any retailer or distributor operating across state lines is that a product perfectly legal to sell in Houston may be a compliance violation in Boston. Your inventory management system, your staff training, your markdown and pull schedules — all of it has to account for this patchwork, which means either you build state-specific rules into your operations or you default to the most restrictive standard across all your locations, which guarantees you're throwing away product you could legally sell in most of the markets you operate in.

The waste problem is enormous and the data is depressing

ReFED estimates that date label confusion is responsible for roughly 20% of consumer-level food waste in the United States. A 2019 survey by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that 84% of consumers reported discarding food near or past the package date at least occasionally, and 37% said they "always" or "usually" discard food once the date passes. The 2013 report from the NRDC and Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic — titled, with appropriate bluntness, "The Dating Game" — documented that the lack of federal standards leads consumers to treat all date labels as safety indicators, regardless of what the manufacturer actually intended the date to communicate. The USDA Economic Research Service estimated in 2020 that the average American household wastes approximately $1,500 worth of food per year, with date label misunderstanding as a contributing factor (though obviously not the only one — people also buy too much, forget about leftovers, and exhibit the same optimistic planning about their vegetable consumption that they exhibit about their gym attendance).

At the retail level, the waste compounds in ways that are less visible but often more expensive per unit. Stores pull products from shelves based on internal policies that typically add buffer days before the printed date — so a product with a Best By date of April 10 might get pulled on April 7, not because of any regulatory requirement but because the store's policy says to create a three-day buffer "just in case," where "just in case" means "just in case a customer complains and we'd rather waste the product than have the conversation." That buffer, multiplied across thousands of SKUs and hundreds of stores, translates to enormous quantities of perfectly good food being discarded, marked down to margins that don't cover handling cost, or — in the best case — diverted to food banks, though many stores lack the logistics to redirect pulled products efficiently even though the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act protects donors from liability in most circumstances.

What you're actually liable for (which is less than you think, and also different than you think)

The liability question around date labels is both more nuanced and less dramatic than most store managers believe, and the gap between perceived risk and actual risk is itself a source of waste.

No state makes it a criminal offense to sell food past a "Best By" date in the general case. The real liability exposure comes from three places, and only one of them has anything to do with date labels. First, you are liable if you sell food that is actually adulterated or unsafe, and the date on the label is completely irrelevant to that determination. If someone gets sick from a product you sold, the question is whether the food was safe — not whether it was past its Best By date. Selling a product one day past a Best By date that causes no illness creates no liability. Selling a product two weeks before its Use By date that was stored at the wrong temperature and causes foodborne illness creates substantial liability. The date is a red herring; the cold chain is what matters.

Second, in states like Montana and Massachusetts, selling past the labeled date is a regulatory violation regardless of whether the food is safe. Fines vary, and enforcement is typically complaint-driven, but a pattern of violations can trigger inspections and escalating penalties. If you operate in one of these states, your compliance obligation is clear and date tracking is not optional.

Third — and this is where most real-world damage actually occurs — there is the reputational risk. A customer who finds a product with a past date on your shelf and posts about it on social media creates a problem that is disproportionate to the underlying reality. "This store sells expired food" is a devastating sentence even when, strictly speaking, the food wasn't expired and the store was operating entirely within its legal rights. The internet does not grade on a regulatory nuance curve.

The customer complaint that every grocery employee has memorized

Every person who has worked a grocery floor has had the interaction where a customer holds up a product and says "this is expired." In most cases, it isn't — the date is a quality indicator, not a safety threshold, and the product may well be within its labeled date anyway. But telling a customer they're wrong about food safety is a conversational path that leads nowhere good.

The practical reality is that your staff needs to be able to acknowledge the customer's concern without reinforcing their misconception, explain the difference between date types simply enough to be understood and confidently enough to be believed, offer an alternative (checking the back for a product with a later date resolves most interactions without generating waste), and know your state's rules well enough to recognize when the product genuinely shouldn't have been on the shelf — which is a process failure to escalate, not a customer service moment to improvise through. And when a customer insists the product is unsafe despite a clear explanation, the correct answer is always to replace it or offer a refund, because the cost of one yogurt is always less than the cost of a lost customer and the cost of a lost customer is always less than the cost of a negative review that gets amplified. This is not a fight worth winning.

The Date Labeling Act would fix most of this, if it ever passes

The Food Date Labeling Act was first introduced in Congress in 2016 by Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representative Chellie Pingree, and it has been reintroduced in subsequent sessions, most recently in 2023. The bill would establish "Best If Used By" as the single standard quality date for all food products, establish "Use By" as the single standard safety date applied only to foods where consumption after the date could pose a health risk, prohibit the "Sell By" date from appearing on consumer-facing packaging (it could still be used in coded form for internal inventory purposes), and preempt the entire patchwork of state laws with a uniform national standard.

It is a good bill. It has bipartisan support. It has backing from major industry groups including the Consumer Brands Association and the Food Marketing Institute. The Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Natural Resources Defense Council have been among its loudest advocates. It has also stalled in committee every single time it has been introduced, which is the legislative equivalent of "the operation was a success but the patient died." As of early 2025, there is no indication that its next introduction will fare differently, though the growing national conversation about food waste and the increasing cost of groceries may eventually create enough political pressure to move it forward.

If it ever does pass, the operational impact on retailers and manufacturers will be significant — reformulating date language across thousands of SKUs, retraining staff on the new two-tier system, and updating inventory and compliance systems. But the long-term payoff would be substantial: a system where "Best If Used By" clearly means quality and "Use By" clearly means safety, and where a product's legal status doesn't change when it crosses a state line. We are not holding our breath, but we are cautiously hopeful.

Treating date management as a data problem instead of a vibes problem

The operational problem, stripped to its core, is this: without batch-level date tracking, store and warehouse staff default to conservative pull schedules. Products get removed from shelves or marked down days before their actual date because nobody has clear visibility into what's expiring when, and when the cost of over-pulling is invisible (it shows up as shrink in an aggregate report three weeks later) but the cost of under-pulling is visceral (an angry customer, a social media post, a health inspector's raised eyebrow), people will always err on the side of throwing things away.

Inventory systems that track at the batch or lot level — with expiry dates attached to each received batch, not just the SKU — fundamentally change this dynamic. FEFO rotation (First Expired, First Out) becomes automatic instead of relying on staff to manually check dates during stocking, which means your oldest product moves first without requiring anyone to remember which pallet arrived Tuesday versus Thursday. Expiry alerts configured by product category give you time to mark down or redirect products to donation channels before they actually need to be pulled, which means you capture some revenue on product that would otherwise be pure loss. Waste reporting with real dates attached shows you exactly how much product you're losing, which date types are driving the loss, and whether your waste is coming from actual expiry or from over-cautious pull policies that a manager set conservatively three years ago and nobody has revisited since. And state compliance rules can be built directly into the system — if you operate in Massachusetts, the system flags products approaching their printed date for removal; if you operate in Texas, the same product stays on the shelf longer because no state restriction applies.

The difference between "pull everything three days before the date" and "pull products based on actual regulatory requirements and date type" can be worth thousands of dollars monthly for a mid-size grocery operation. That's not a theoretical savings. That's margin you're currently converting into trash.

ShelfLifePro tracks expiry dates at the batch level and automates FEFO rotation, markdown alerts, and waste reporting — so you stop throwing away product you could legally and safely sell. See how it works for [food and beverage retailers](/food-beverage).