New food label prompts Canadians to rethink best-before dates

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Best-before dates are notoriously misleading. Contrary to popular belief, they have nothing to do with food safety and everything to do with peak quality, as determined by the manufacturer. Food can be safe to eat after these dates, with the exact time window dependent on the product. It may just be less flavourful, crunchy or colourful than if you had eaten it before.

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Too Good To Go, an app that connects eaters to unsold food at half the price or less, has launched a new labelling scheme in Canada. The “Look-Smell-Taste” label aims to help people reduce household food waste by reminding them that past-dated food can still be good to eat.

Cracker Barrel, Epic Tofu, Greenhouse, Kopi Thyme and Ristorante (Dr. Oetker) are among the 15 food brands that have placed Too Good To Go’s “Look-Smell-Taste” label alongside the best-before date for launch on June 18. Last year alone, 500-plus brands printed the label on more than six billion European products.

“We always say our competition is the bin,” says Andrea Li, country director of Too Good To Go Canada. “When we look, we smell, we taste, we’re making a good judgement. And we know that things are still edible and that best-before dates are very much an indicator of freshness versus food safety.”

Since its launch in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2016, Too Good To Go has expanded to 18 countries in Europe and North America, including France, Italy, the United States and Spain. The app launched in Canada in 2021, where the company says it has since saved more than five million meals from going to waste.

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The “Look-Smell-Taste” label rolled out in Europe in 2019. Canada is the first country in North America to adopt it, joining 13 European countries. Though “Look-Smell-Taste” is launching in Canada with 15 brands, Li’s goal is for all products with a best-before date to bear the label.

“Food waste is at every stage of the value chain, so the technology we’ve built is just one step. And I think this part is really exciting because education goes so much further when we’re able to empower folks to make the decisions themselves in a very informed and educated way. Hence, together with the partners that we’re bringing on, I believe that our reach can be so much stronger and go so much further.”

The UN Food Waste Index Report 2024 shows that households worldwide waste at least one billion meals a day. Second Harvest research found that nearly 60 per cent of all food produced in Canada is lost or wasted, amounting to 35.5 million tonnes — most of which is wasted at home.

According to Too Good To Go research, 92 per cent of Canadians check best-before dates on foods before consuming them. “Not consumed before the date” is the second most frequent reason people throw away food at home. Forty per cent of Canadians toss past-dated items at least once per week, even though 50 per cent don’t understand what a best-before date means and how it differs from an expiration date (which applies to a limited number of products with nutritional specifications, such as formulated liquid diets and infant formula.)

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Best-before dates don’t mean “bad after,” says Sylvain Charlebois, director of Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab (AAL) and an unpaid ambassador of the “Look-Smell-Taste” campaign.

According to a previous AAL study, only 27 per cent of Canadians would be willing to do without best-before dates. Charlebois sees the new label as a compromise between scrapping the dates altogether and making people more aware of what they mean. “Will it influence behaviour? We don’t know, but at least it gets people to think about this issue and question the validity of the date on packages. Frankly, best-before dates are pretty trivial. There’s nothing scientific about best-before dates, and people think it’s scientific. It’s just not.”

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