Abstract
A leading factor in the creation of avoidable household food waste is confusion about food date labels. In the United States, date labels are largely unregulated, resulting in a plethora of date label phrases used in commerce. Federal regulation has been proposed but never passed, while both industry and government have provided voluntary guidance on preferred label phrases. We study food producer adherence to the label phrases endorsed by the Trading Partner Alliance (TPA, an industry group), which includes “Use By” for perishable products subject to a material degradation of critical performance or potential food safety concern and “Best If Used By” for all other packaged foods. Based on three studies conducted between the fall of 2018 and the summer of 2019 that use two distinct measurement methodologies, we find adherence to be less than 50% and to differ by product category, retailer, region, and brand type (store versus national brands). We find numerous dry goods and other foods that are better suited to the “Best If Used By” phrase instead feature the “Use By” phrase. This misapplication of phrases to products and the low TPA phrase adherence rate suggests that practices as of the summer of 2019 may still contribute to consumer confusion about date labels and to inadvertent food discard. We explore possible reasons why our estimated adherence rate is lower than industry reported figures and discuss tradeoffs between government regulation and industry self-regulation.
Highlights
The amount of avoidable food waste continues to attract policy attention among governments and organizations at the local, regional, national, and international levels because reducing avoidable food waste is hypothesized to forward sustainability goals including environmental, economic, and social objectives
We found that 35.6% of the surveyed items in stores in 2019 featured a Trading Partner Alliance (TPA)-endorsed date label phrase (95% confidence interval, 34.3% to 36.9%) with 30.7% featuring the phrase “Best if Used By” and 4.9% featuring the phrase “Use By”
We used two distinct data collection methodologies to provide data on the share of food products that adhere to the date label phrases endorsed in 2017 by the TPA, an organization of food industry partners that produce or sell packaged food
Summary
The amount of avoidable food waste continues to attract policy attention among governments and organizations at the local, regional, national, and international levels because reducing avoidable food waste is hypothesized to forward sustainability goals including environmental, economic, and social objectives. A leading factor in the creation of avoidable household food waste is consumer confusion about food date labels (i.e., the dates and accompanying phrases found on food packages). Quested and Murphy [1] estimate that as much as one-third of avoidable household food waste in the United Kingdom could be attributed to consumer confusion about date labels. Many consumers interpret these dates as a point in time after which the safety of the product declines while, for most products, the date serves as the manufacturer’s estimate of the point in time after which the quality of the product may begin to decline [2,3]. Qi and Roe [4] found 70% of U.S respondents agreed that throwing away food after its label date has passed will reduce the odds of foodborne illness, while Neff, Spiker, and Truant [5] found that 65% of U.S respondents listed food poisoning as a motivation for discarding food in their homes
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