California Banned The Food Label That Has Been Confusing Shoppers For Decades

California's food date labeling law took effect on July 1st 2026, making it the first state in the US to ban consumer-facing Sell By dates on packaged foods and require that any date label on a product sold in the state use only two standardized phrases: Best If Used By, which tells shoppers when a product will be at its peak quality but remains safe to eat after that date, and Use By, which indicates a genuine food safety deadline that should not be ignored. The law, Assembly Bill 660, signed by Governor Newsom in September 2024, was driven by a straightforward finding: more than 50 differently phrased date labels are currently in use across the United States, including Best By, Freshest By, Expires On, and Sell By, and research has consistently shown that consumers cannot reliably distinguish between a quality date and a safety date. A widely cited 2013 study found that 20 percent of all food waste originates from people being confused about expiration dates, throwing away food that is still perfectly safe to eat because a Sell By date has passed. Sell By dates were originally designed for retailers to manage inventory rotation, not for consumers to make safety decisions, but they ended up on the consumer-facing side of packaging anyway and have been misread ever since.

California estimates the law could prevent 70,000 tons of food waste per year in the state alone, and the broader stakes are significant: CalRecycle reports that 2.5 billion meals worth of unspoiled food is thrown away annually in California, with organic waste in landfills accounting for 41 percent of the state's methane emissions, a greenhouse gas more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Retailers may still use coded stock-rotation dates for internal inventory purposes, as long as those codes are not easily readable by consumers and do not use the phrase Sell By. The law does not apply to infant formula, eggs, or beer and other malt beverages. New York State passed similar legislation this year and it awaits the governor's signature, and experts say California's move may create enough market pressure on national manufacturers that some adopt the standardized language across all their products rather than maintaining different labels for different states. Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste, which co-sponsored the bill, summed up the core change simply: now every company that puts Use By means the same thing, and every company that puts Best If Used By means the same thing, and that is something that has never been true in American grocery stores before.

Source:https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/02/us/california-food-labels-sell-by.html