The “Sell By” Date Was Never Meant for You. California Just Banned It.
Here is something I knew from working in stock control long before I knew it as a shopper: a “sell by” date is an instruction to the store, not to you.
It exists so a stock clerk knows which case to pull forward and which to pull off. It is a rotation marker. In every warehouse system I worked in, that date sat in a field the customer was never supposed to see, right next to the batch number and the receiving date. It leaked onto the front of the package somewhere along the way, and Americans have been throwing away perfectly good food because of it ever since.
On July 1, 2026, California stopped it. Six weeks ago, quietly, with almost no coverage. https://americankitchentales.com/buying-in-bulk-real-savings-or-a-false-bargain/
What actually changed
California’s AB 660 took effect on July 1 and became the first mandatory state-level date labeling law in the country. It cuts every phrase down to two.
If the date is about quality, the package has to say “Best if Used By” or “Best if Used or Frozen By.” If the date is about safety, it has to say “Use By” or “Use or Freeze By.” That is the entire vocabulary now.
And consumer-facing “Sell By” dates are prohibited. Retailers can still use a coded sell-by for stock rotation, which is exactly right, because that information is genuinely useful to the person restocking the shelf and genuinely useless to the person standing in front of it.
Eggs and infant formula are carved out. Anything packaged or labeled on or after July 1, 2026 has to comply.
Why this needed a law
Because there were more than fifty different date phrasings in use across the US market, according to Californians Against Waste, one of the bill’s co-sponsors.
Fifty. For a piece of information that has exactly two possible meanings: this might not taste as good after this date, or this might make you sick after this date.
There has never been a federal standard. Outside of infant formula, no federal regulation requires date labeling at all or dictates what the words should say, so each manufacturer picks its own phrasing. The FDA and USDA have both recommended “Best if Used By” for years, but recommending is not requiring, and the shelf shows it.
The result is a gap I find genuinely funny in a bleak way. In a 2025 survey, 87% of consumers said they understood eight different date labels they were shown. Only 53% actually answered correctly.
That is not a knowledge problem. That is a confidence problem. People are not confused and aware of it; they are confused and certain.
What it costs
Two numbers get quoted here and they do not match, so let me give you both and explain why.
ReFED estimates that date label confusion alone drives about 3 billion pounds of discarded food a year, worth roughly $7 billion. FDA Deputy Commissioner Jim Jones has said that confusion over date labeling terms accounts for around 20% of food waste in the home.
But the Congressional Research Service put date label confusion at 7% of all US food waste.
Those are not contradictory, they are different denominators. Home waste is a subset of total waste, which also includes farms, processing, distribution, and restaurants. Twenty percent of the household slice can be seven percent of the whole pie. When you see either number quoted alone, check which one is being measured, because outlets swap them constantly and the two tell very different stories about where the problem is.
For scale on the whole pie: USDA estimates 30% of the US food supply is lost or wasted at retail and consumer levels.
What the dates actually mean
This is the part worth keeping, whether or not you live in California.
“Best if Used By” is about quality. It is the manufacturer’s opinion about when the product stops being at its peak. USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service is explicit that food not showing signs of spoilage should still be wholesome and may be sold, donated, and eaten past this date.
“Use By” is about safety, and it is the one to respect. On infant formula it is a hard rule with federal weight behind it.
“Sell By,” where you still see it, is a stock rotation instruction. It tells you how long the store planned to display it, not how long the food is good. Yogurt and milk routinely stay fine well past it.
“Packed On” is a manufacturing date and tells you nothing on its own.
Your nose and your eyes remain better instruments than any of these for most foods. Not for everything, and not for anything you left in the danger zone on a counter overnight. But for a yogurt three days past a printed date, they are the right tool.
What I do with this
I read the words on the label, not just the numbers. This sounds obvious and I did not do it for years. “Best if Used By March 4” and “Use By March 4” are completely different instructions printed in identical type, and the difference between them is the difference between throwing out dinner and eating it.
I buy short-dated items on purpose when the store discounts them and I have a plan for the food that week. Markdown racks are the cheapest section of any grocery store and they exist because of this confusion.
And I stopped treating my freezer as storage and started treating it as a pause button. “Best if Used or Frozen By” is doing real work as a phrase. Freezing before the date stops the clock.
What comes next
California is one state, but food manufacturers do not run separate label lines per state when they can avoid it. A national brand that has to comply in California generally reprints for everybody. That is why California vehicle rules and California chemical warnings end up on products in Ohio, and it is the likely path here too.
At the federal level, the FDA and USDA opened a joint request for information on date labeling in December 2024 and received over 9,800 comments backing standardization. Neither agency has committed to a rule. The FDA has set January 1, 2028 as the uniform compliance date for food labeling regulations published between 2025 and the end of 2026, which is the window a federal rule would have to land in to use it. https://ag.purdue.edu/news/2023/12/consumers-grapple-with-confusion-over-food-date-labels.html
So: a state law in force now, a federal process moving slowly, and a supply chain that will probably standardize on its own before Washington finishes deciding.
Meanwhile, the thing to remember is the one I started with. The most confusing date on American packaging was a warehouse instruction that escaped into the retail aisle and cost households billions of dollars in thrown-out food. Sometimes the fix really is that small.
