Ottawa pushed to look into a best before date system to reduce grocery waste

Canadians’ misunderstanding of best-before dates could contribute to excessive food waste and thus food insecurity, experts say as a government commission urges Ottawa to investigate the issue.

A report on food affordability from a House of Commons Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food includes calls for Canada to abolish best-before dates because of the widespread misconception that they indicate whether a product is safe to consume.

Experts say they only indicate when a product has reached its maximum freshness.

“There’s a lot of confusion about what food labels mean,” Kate Parizeau, a professor at the University of Guelph who studies food waste, said Tuesday.

“Many people think that expiration dates are expiration dates, when in fact there are very few products in Canada that have a correct expiration date.”

In general, the only foods with an expiration date are those with a specific nutritional requirement that may diminish over time, such as baby food. On the other hand, best before dates are required for foods that are expected to spoil within 90 days.

Food manufacturers and processors tend to slap them on all sorts of produce, Parizeau said, and they’re of limited use.

“I think a lot of people have this idea that advance dates are set by scientists in a lab measuring how many days it takes for a product to go bad,” she said.

“It doesn’t work that way. It’s something the government tells manufacturers to figure out themselves in-house, so it’s a bit of a black box.”

Parizeau encouraged consumers to learn more about food safety so they can determine for themselves whether groceries are spoiled.

“We are so disconnected from our food sources. We don’t know when the product was picked. We don’t know how long it should last,” she said.

“So if someone wraps peppers in cellophane and puts a sticker on them, we think, ‘OK, this makes sense. I can trust what the sticker says.’ Partly because we also don’t understand how that decision came about.”

Canadians throw out “perfectly good food.”

Lori Nikkel, CEO of Second Harvest Canada, is quoted in the government report as saying that best-before dates encourage people to throw away “perfectly good food” while many are starving due to rising costs.

“Abolishing best-before dates would prevent safe, consumable food from being thrown away and save Canadians money on their grocery bills,” she said in the report released last month, which recommended the government examine “how the abolition of ‘best before’ dates on food would affect Canadians.”

Michael von Massow, a food labeling expert who also teaches at the University of Guelph, said he favors doing away with the labels.

“Because they’re so misinterpreted, I think it’s really valuable to get rid of them,” he said.

Von Massow said the extent to which food waste drives up costs is not clear, although it makes sense that it plays a role by reducing supply and increasing food demand.

“If we threw out less stuff, we would save money in our households, even if prices didn’t change,” von Massow said.

“So I think there’s an argument that prices could change if we threw out less of some products. But even if it didn’t change, if we threw out less, our grocery budget would go down.”

The suggestion that the government investigate the possible effects of scrapping best before dates is one of 13 in the report.