Why do so many shops in UK sell out of date Food?

[sitefive]

Pretty much every highstreet in every town has some type or ''bargain'' store where they sell totally out of date food for good prices, obviously they get the food which has reached its expiration date for probably next to nothing or they even pay them to take that stuff away and make good profit selling on to public! I can name at least 7+ shops in my area where 50% of the stuff they sell it out of date by several months, while the rest has got maybe a half month left for a product which has 1year+ expiration date in first place.

How is this even allowed in this country? I come from much poorer country originally and no1 would do stuff like this, if they did they would go out of business and get fined heavily. But here seems it's just normal and no1 says anything about it???

 

[artie]

There are at least two different dates which can be put on food.

Best before. This means the food can still be legally sold after the date.

Sell by. Means the food can't be legally sold after that date.

AFAIK

 

[AJB Temple]

I have never seen such a shop.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Yes, best before is only the date after which someone deems that it starts to degrade, and that may be in taste or texture - it might be months or years before it actually becomes dangerous, if ever. I'd like to find the shops.

 

[doctor Bob]

I haven't either.................. could this be a north / south thing.

 

[sitefive]

I haven't either.................. could this be a north / south thing.

It's north thing, once I got lucky and bought a 2year out of date cat food, well my cat ate it anyway, didn't complained.
most of the products I suppose just have the best before date , and honestly if it passes smell/taste test I don't care about the date , but I'm just shocked to see there are whole chains who are openly doing this and everyone is ok with it.
Obviously large supermarkets aren't doing this but a lot of the small guys and probably all the guys who sell stuff at bootsales /fairs are doing this.

 

[RobinBHM]

Poundland and ilk I suppose.

 

[mouppe]

I used to work at M&S when I was younger, and on the sell-by date the staff were able to buy the expired food at a staff shop for next-to-nothing prices that very day or the following morning. If there was anything left after that, a nun would come and take it away for free in the evening. We never sold out-of-date food to customers unless it was a mistake. I think it would have been illegal.

I worked there from age 16 right through university, and I can tell you my student fridge was the best in Britain!

Here in Canada there is a clear difference between "Best Before" and "Expiry date." I think the UK may be similar.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/best-befo ... -1.3006858

 

[No skills]

About ten minutes from me there is a company that sells food that's about to go past its date (which ever one), maybe they sell stuff that's past its date as well - I don't know as I haven't been in there and looked.

At my last place of employment somebody there claimed to have worked at the discount food place, when asked what he did he said that one of his jobs was to remove dates on certain food packets or tins (?) with cellulose thinners and put new dates on.
I cant confirm this is true at all and maybe complete rubbish, however it is a strange thing to make up so who knows - not me

 

[Terry - Somerset]

From a DEFRA document - 2011 but I doubt the principals have changed:

A product with a ‘use by’ date cannot be sold after that date and should not be used after
midnight of that day.

‘Best before’ dates relate to food quality, including taste, texture, aroma and appearance,
whilst ‘use by’ dates relate to food safety. The ‘best before’ date is a quality indication used by
the manufacturer to indicate that the food will be, assuming correct storage has been
maintained, at its best before a certain date. A food which is past its ‘best before’ date should be
safe to eat, but may not be at its best quality after this date.

So the major supermarkets will disinclined to sell food beyond the BB date as (a) the public largely do not understand the distinction, (b) possible degradation of flavour etc, and (c) brand reputation.

But there will be resellers serving price sensitive markets where the public will be happy to pick up bargain priced products.

Terry

 

[MIGNAL]

I suppose certain fresh food can be difficult to predict when it becomes unsafe to eat. I guess meat has a use by date but they have no way of telling how you yourself are going to store it. You could be leaving it out in the full sun or putting it in the fridge on the full cold setting.
Personally I just look at the colour and smell it.

Oh and it's certainly a North/South thing. It's grim up here but at least there's a bit more space. Less runways too.
Oh and you can stop your silly fast train at Birmingham, we don't want it!

 

[mseries]

Certainly not a north thing. Only this morning I read in Metro whilst on the train that a person was running a shop selling food nearing their sell by date and food that has been rejected by supermarkets. The shop in is Cornwall. It's all over the papers today,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/news ... risis.html

 

[Sporky McGuffin]

Yes, best before is only the date after which someone deems that it starts to degrade, and that may be in taste or texture - it might be months or years before it actually becomes dangerous, if ever.

Some things might even improve.

 

[misterfish]

We've got a Poundland in Chichester and we're on the south coast. Previously (at least 12 years ago) when we lived in the Mendips our local town of Midsomer Norton had a Cottle's pound shop which was the first pound type shop we'd ever seen.

Misterfish

 

[Bm101]

Years ago i was at college in Bangor (Wales) and there was a whole culture of bindipping the sainsburys skip. They'd bag up maybe a ton of fresh food a week and skip it. Someone would go and empty it out and do a round of the local student houses delivering bread or whatever. Nothing wrong with it at all. Next night someone would turn up with vegetables or fruit. All completely edible and clean because they used to go to the trouble of bagging it all up first. Sainos obviously got wind of it and put a padlock on the skip which was duly superglued. Routine then ensued of new locks being superglued for a while. In the end they erected a security fence round the skip. Wonder how much that cost? How did they secure it?
Padlocks....
This was twenty odd years ago, I believe some supermarkets now make an effort not to waste that food by supplying it to shelters etc. How many, I don't know.
I wouldn't bindip now. Got no need to and what suits when you're young free and single dont suit 40, 2 kids and mortgaged to the eyeballs.
But I still find it mad that we have people short of food and there is still this culture of commercial waste of food on an epic scale.

About as far from an idealist as you can get but I find it odd.

*gets down from ranting horse

Edit* They never worked out they could have stopped it by not triple bagging all the food they were throwing in the skip. :shock:

 

[dickm]

Co-ops round here have special labels that say "still fresh" on stuff that is past its "best before" dates and this gets sold increasingly cheaply as it approaches the use by date. We buy a high proportion of our food that way, and so far alive to tell the tale! Mind you, someone had misread the date on a packet of UHT milk which had the still fresh sticker, a month date a few days away, but the year was 12 months previously!

 

[JakeS]

A product with a ‘use by’ date cannot be sold after that date and should not be used after
midnight of that day.

‘Best before’ dates relate to food quality, including taste, texture, aroma and appearance,
whilst ‘use by’ dates relate to food safety.

To put it bluntly: "Use By" is the date after which the product may actually hurt you if you eat it. "Best Before" is the date the supermarket puts on things to point at if you bring it back and complain that it's not super-fresh any more.

In addition some supermarkets mark some products with a "Sell By", which is generally the date after which they will remove it from their shelves as they don't want to get a bad reputation for selling not-quite-up-to-snuff stuff, but which bears absolutely no relation to any food-safety prediction whatsoever, and has only a tenuous link to food-quality.




Now, a serious proportion of food waste comes from the supermarkets themselves.

At one end they're baking three times as much bread as they can sell in a day and then binning most of it because they think that people buy more other things if they can smell fresh bread.

In the middle they're knowingly over-stocking their shelves with products that they know won't sell before they go bad because they think that people are put off going to a supermarket which doesn't have completely full shelves (someone tell this to Sainsbury's Free-From buyer, though, they've been out of naan for weeks and they just keep pushing the cardboard rolls over to cover the gap).

At the other end they're rejecting tonnes of fruit and vegetables because they want to have prettier fruit and veg bins than the next supermarket over and they're terrified that the slightest imperfection in the skin of that apple will make people abandon them wholesale. People like to complain about EU banana-bendiness rules, but the supermarkets are an order of magnitude more prissy than the EU has ever been.


If there's people mopping up the huge quantities of food that supermarkets refuse to sell or otherwise waste for no good reason, more power to them!

Edit* They never worked out they could have stopped it by not triple bagging all the food they were throwing in the skip. :shock:

They probably had worked out that if they didn't triple-bag all the food they were throwing away they'd have a fox infestation instead of a student infestation! Foxes are one of the few creatures that manages to make more of a mess than students.

Mind you, someone had misread the date on a packet of UHT milk which had the still fresh sticker, a month date a few days away, but the year was 12 months previously!

Wait, UHT milk goes off?!

 

[dickm]

Mind you, someone had misread the date on a packet of UHT milk which had the still fresh sticker, a month date a few days away, but the year was 12 months previously!

Wait, UHT milk goes off?!

Dunno - even as cheapskate as we are, we decided not to test it!
But with you all the way on silly cosmetic standards for fruit. - makes me furious.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

My family owned a hotel. If we had a wedding with an expensive buffet for 200 people perhaps with perhaps pork, beef, ham, and chicken we had to cater for nearly everyone picking the same meat - it didn't happen, of course, but it had to be catered for. This would cause arguments with the organisers, who would invariably lay claim to everything left. We couldn't let them take the meat of course as they hadn't actually paid for it (this was served, not left for people to pick at) - they had paid for 200 perfect meals of their guest's choices which is what they had had. However, no one ever wanted the sweet stuff, sausage rolls, sarnies etc. so we used to carefully parcel it up and take it to a home for disabled children virtually next door - until they were stopped by council elf & safety people from accepting it. The children had a xmas party every week until petty bureaucracy stopped it.

 

[ChrisR]

Yes, best before is only the date after which someone deems that it starts to degrade, and that may be in taste or texture - it might be months or years before it actually becomes dangerous, if ever. I'd like to find the shops.

Such a shop has just opened in (Newquay at Wesley Yard), most products at 25p.

Take care.

Chris R.