New study demonstrates how much food is wasted because of date labels

Want to save money on grocery costs?

Pay less attention to those dates you find on packaged foods.

A new Canadian study demonstrates just how much food we throw out because we are putting way too much stock in date labels.

The survey was commissioned by Too Good To Go, an app-based company that sells surplus food. It was conducted by Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab earlier this year.

“On a yearly basis, an average Canadian household discards $761 worth of food because it reached the date. And out of all this money, $246 is linked to best-before-date confusion,” says the company’s Nicolas Dot.

The release of the results is part of a wider campaign to highlight how much food is wasted in Canada and how much of that can be traced back to myths and misconceptions about date labels.

This most recent survey demonstrates a large portion of Canadians have a poor understanding of that date.

“When we ask them through this research to define what a best-before date is, one in five confuses it with an expiration date. It really shows some education is needed,” Dot says.

So what is a best-before date? It’s not an expiry date. A date label is just a food company’s way of saying the product’s freshness and flavour are at their maximum before the numbers stamped on the packaging.

As much as a quarter of all food wasted in Canadian homes stems from confusion over this date.

That rate is even higher among younger people.

“Forty per cent of people belonging to the Generation Z demographic in Canada don’t know the meaning of a best-before date. Over half discard food on a regular basis if it’s past the date, even if it’s still edible,” notes Dot.

The amount of food wasted in Canada prompted the company last year to launch “Look-Smell-Taste” to try to convince Canadians that it’s the food’s smell and taste — not the date — that determines if it should go in the garbage.

Certain products — Paz Bakery, Terry’s Chocolate, Dr. Oetker, to name a few — carry the Look-Smell-Taste label to give consumers the confidence to make their own determinations about food safety.

So, is it time to get rid of best-before dates?

Dot says research done by Dalhousie’s lab two years ago shows 60 per cent of Canadians do not want companies to get rid of date labelling.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says products with a shelf life longer than 90 days are not required to carry a best-before date.