Date labels and storage guidance
Around 2.9 million tonnes of food and drink is thrown away by consumers before ever being cooked or served. Confusion around date labels and storage guidance is thought to contribute significantly to this and the food industry and WRAP are working towards a solution and helping consumers to better understand, and have confidence in, date labels and storing food correctly (e.g. what food can be frozen and when).
Date labels
The Food Matters Report emphasises the need for more consistent and accessible advice to consumers around food, including date labelling.
As a result, food manufacturers, retailers, WRAP and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) are co-ordinating efforts to:
- improve consumer understanding and confidence in date labels;
- clarify the existing guidance to industry on the use of date labels; and
- enable changes to industry practice that will lead to greater consistency and simplification in the use of date labels.
The ultimate aims are to:
- Communicate 'use by' dates as the main indicator of food safety, restricting its use to situations where there is a genuine food safety risk.
- Reinforce that 'best before' dates are an indicator of food quality not safety, meaning that food may be safe to eat after this date, although not at it's best quality;
- Communicate that consumers can ignore other date labels such as 'display until' and 'sell by'. Retailers use these for stock control and we will work with industry to investigate whether these could be replaced or made less visble.
The Love Food Hate Waste campaign will expand to include advice on date labelling specifically aimed at consumers.
Storage guidance
For date labelling to be effective, food needs to be stored in the right way. However, research has revealed that this is not being done, which could mean food spoiling before it should and food safety risks.
Government and the food industry is working closely with WRAP to deliver more consistent and clearer storage guidance and freezing advice, giving consumers greater confidence around cooking and freezing food.
Major retailers and brands have already taken action, for example, improving in-store and on-line consumer advice on how to store fresh fruit and vegetables.
Example ... simple but effective
The Co-operative has introduced storage instructions for fruit and vegetables on fresh produce bags.
The instructions relate to a selection of loose fruit and vegetables, indicating the optimum conditions under which each of the products should be kept to maintain freshness e.g. 'apples kept in the fridge can keep for an extra two weeks.'
Printing instructions on bags ensure customers can take the information home with them.
For other examples about packaging and food waste see:
Courtauld Commitment Case Studies (1728 kb) ![[pdf]](http://www.wrap.org.uk/display_images/document_icons/pdf.gif){kind=icon}
Love Food Hate Waste consumer campaign
