Ireland’s food safety watchdog has expressed support for retailers who remove the best-before dates on some food products in order to reduce food waste generated by Irish shoppers.
Marks & Spencer and SuperValu are among the supermarket chains that have been taking steps in recent weeks to remove the best-before dates which have been routinely used to indicate whether foods are safe to eat.
Last month Marks & Spencer began phasing out best-before dates on hundreds of fruit and vegetable ranges while SuperValu has also removed references to dates from certain own-brand fruit and vegetable products.
About €700 worth of food on average is binned by Irish households each year with a significant portion of the waste made up of fresh produce that has passed its best-before date. Many consumers throw food out simply because it has passed its best-before date even though it remains perfectly edible.
Extrapolating from figures released by the UK Waste Resources Action Programme, the simple step of taking best-before dates of fresh fruit and vegetables could stop as many as 700,000 baskets of food ending up in landfills in Ireland each year with the measure being better for the environment and for shoppers’ wallets.
“The issue of ‘best-before dates’ is not about food safety,” Dr Mairead McCann of Safefood told The Irish Times. She said such dates are “only a guideline indicating when to use the product to ensure that its quality is of the highest standard”.
She added that when it comes to uncut and unprocessed fruit and vegetables, once the food hasn’t started to rot “a consumer can use their own discretion in determining whether the food is of good enough quality to eat”.
She said the food safety authority supported retailer “efforts to reduce food waste and are in favour of giving consumers appropriate information that helps them make informed choices about the food they purchase”.
She stressed that ‘best-before dates’ should not be confused with ‘use-by dates’, which are used on perishable foods. “These foods need to be stored safely by following the instructions on their labels and must be eaten within the ‘use-by date’. The ‘use-by date’ is about the safety of the food and is a deadline,” Dr McCann said.
“We’re determined to tackle food waste,” a spokeswoman for Marks & Spencer said, pointing to the removal of best-before dates, “where safe to do so, trialling new ways to sell our products and galvanising our customers to get creative with leftovers and embrace change”.
A SuperValu spokeswoman said waste reduction was “an important element of [its] sustainability agenda” and said it had already extended the shelf life of 20 per cent of its fruit and vegetable products as well as removing dates from certain own-brand fruit and vegetables”.
Lidl has also taken significant steps to remove best-before dates with the majority of its ranges sold without any references to dates, “apart from a small selection of items which are required to by law as they have been washed and prepared by the supplier”.
