British supermarkets do away with expiry labels on fruits and vegetables

Is it good or expired? Yet another British supermarket decides to do away with labels that indicate how long fresh food should be “preferably” consumed. Starting in September, Waitrose will leave it to its customers to assess whether products from a list of more than 500 types of fruits and vegetables are in good condition to be brought to the table.

The brand is one of the last among the big ones that had not yet taken this step. The measure aims to reduce waste and lower the prices of products at a time when inflation remains at the highest level in the last 40 years.

This is not to say that consumers will be forced to eat old products. There are two distinct labels. The expiration date itself, which is kept for sanitary reasons. It indicates that a certain product can no longer be consumed after that date, as it can be harmful to health. But there is also the one that recommends until when the product should preferably be consumed. It’s not today that they make confusion in the consumer’s mind and, therefore, many people throw away items that could be perfectly consumed, such as fruits and vegetables.

According to the NGO Waste & Resources Action Program, WRAP, 4.5 million tons of food that could be consumed is thrown away annually. The organization claims that waste fuels climate change and costs consumers money. Data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) indicate that every year one third of the world’s food production is wasted.

It’s that old argument that everyone has had at home one day. How long to eat a product that is in the fridge? If it is a fruit, vegetable or yogurt, in principle, everyone is able to recognize it by smell or taste. But this will not cause illness or death. There are already supermarkets in the UK that say people should smell the milk to see if it’s still good.

At the beginning of 2019, there was a great controversy on the subject in the country. Former Prime Minister Theresa May said in public that she removed that layer of mold you get on fruit jellies and ate it anyway. A lot of people turned up their noses. Everyone had an opinion on the matter. Many defended at the time that no one died from eating jelly like the former prime minister.

The Waitrose initiative is not the first in the UK

The first was Tesco, which in 2018 dropped the “preferably consume up to” tags from 100 products. Marks & Spencer did the same last month with 300 types of fruits and vegetables. The problem is that the movement promises to be even broader and, certainly, in the eyes of many, more controversial. The tag “use by” or the equivalent of the expiration date is still valid and serves to show that a certain food cannot be consumed after the date marked on the package. It has to be present in microbiologically perishable products. There are items that must clearly display it, such as fresh meat, fish, crustaceans or cheese. But it is up to the producers to decide whether and which label they intend to use.

In January of this year, Morrisons supermarket dared and warned that it was removing the “use by” date on 90% of its own milk brands to encourage consumers to take what they called a smell test. Thus, they would avoid wastage of the product. The Co-Op, meanwhile, said it was changing the “expiration” labels on its yogurts to “preferably consume until.”

All this can still cause a lot of controversy. It is necessary to know if this movement means that supermarkets will throw less items away and, therefore, offer discounts to consumers in times of high inflation, the highest in 40 years. And more: how to ensure that, despite this flexibility, which may even be fair in many cases, the consumer will continue to consume food that is safe for their health? In Brazil, the use of the expiration date is a pacified point. But the expressions “preferably consume before”, or “consumption before”, in the eyes of the Consumer Protection Code are not clear, which has led the Public Ministry to question its use.