What the Date Means

The can of tomatoes in the back of the pantry

It says "Best By Mar 2026." It is now late summer 2026. Is the food inside dangerous? Most people would throw it away, and most of the time they would be wrong. For the majority of packaged foods sold in the United States, the date on the label communicates quality, not safety. It is the manufacturer's estimate of when the product will be at its best flavor or texture, not a deadline after which the food becomes harmful.

That distinction matters because misunderstanding it is one of the largest drivers of household food waste. Food that is perfectly usable gets discarded because the printed date has passed and the person holding the can assumes it means "expired." Federal guidance is clear on this point, and the reading for this module walks through exactly what each type of date marking does and does not tell you.

Four phrases, four different meanings

The dates on food packages use specific phrases, and they are not interchangeable:

• "Best if Used By" is about quality
• "Sell By" is for the store, not you
• "Use By" is the manufacturer's recommendation
• "Freeze By" is a quality suggestion for timing

There is one critical exception to the general pattern. Infant formula carries a federally required Use-By date that should not be ignored. Beyond that single case, federal law generally does not require date labeling on food products, and the dates that appear are primarily the manufacturer's quality guidance, not a universal federal safety cutoff.

A date on a package tells you something. It rarely tells you what most people assume it does.

Read three packages from your kitchen

The action step asks you to pull three packaged foods from your own kitchen and examine what is actually printed on each one. Identify the phrase, note the date, and record what type of marking it is. The purpose is not to memorize a classification system. It is to stop treating every printed date as the same thing, because once you can read a date correctly, you stop throwing away food that was never in danger and start paying closer attention to the food that actually needs watching.