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(Bloomberg) — Chances are you or someone you know has thrown away perfectly good food because of confusion over date labels. Now the US government is looking for a solution.
A group of four federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, announced last week that it is requesting information from the food industry about labeling practices and preferences, as well as research findings on how consumers perceive date labels and the related impacts on food. waste. The public is also encouraged to share their perceptions, with comments accepted until February 3, 2025. This effort is a crucial first step toward potential regulation, which could prevent food from being thrown away unnecessarily. But the new Trump administration wants to rein in government spending and red tape, leaving the possibility of new regulations in limbo.
The problem is clear: the public has difficulty understanding dozens of differently worded labels, often wrongly assuming that they all refer to food safety. There are currently no national standards in the US. Instead, voluntary labeling guidelines have been established by the Food Industry Association and what is now the Consumer Brands Association – both trade groups – although not all companies adhere to them; Additionally, implementation of these guidelines varies due to a patchwork of different state laws. That makes widespread consumer confusion understandable, said Dana Gunders, president of the U.S.-based nonprofit ReFED, which focuses on reducing food waste.
“Consumers frequently misinterpret date labels to indicate the safety of food, when in reality that is not the case,” she says.
The three most commonly used labels are: ‘used by’, ‘best if used by’ and ‘sell by’. The former is often used as an expiration date – and the date consumers should pay the most attention to, says Roni Neff, a food waste researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, while the latter typically refers to the maximum freshness of a food item. (The school is backed by Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, parent company of Bloomberg News/Businessweek/TV etc.)
The “sell by” label, meanwhile, generally refers to the date by which stores must remove products from shelves, and is typically a date set before food can spoil. “Consumers should actually ignore them,” says Neff.
The Biden administration is targeting food waste because of its heavy climate toll. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly 60% of the potent greenhouse gas methane emitted from U.S. municipal solid waste landfills comes from decomposing food. In June, the government released a national strategy for reducing food waste, which identified consumer confusion over date labels as a major problem. The Department of Agriculture estimates that between 30% and 40% of the U.S. food supply is wasted, with households being the largest contributors.
“We have a national goal to cut food waste in half by 2030,” says Neff, “and we are quite far behind that.”
Some of the efforts the Biden administration has undertaken were initiated during the first Trump administration, said Emily Broad Leib, founder and director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic. The Trump administration launched an interagency initiative in 2018 aimed at improving coordination and communication on how to better educate Americans about reducing food waste. That same year, Trump signed a farm bill that “created the first-ever federal food loss and waste liaison position” to collaborate across agencies, Broad Leib explains.
Experts are hopeful that the process will continue regardless of who is in the White House because, beyond environmental reasons, reducing food waste is a way for consumers to save money at a time when grocery bills have soared. According to Broad Leib, the average American household spends about $1,500 to $2,000 per year on food that isn’t eaten.
“It could be even higher with food prices being higher as they are now,” she says.
Trump could use the data collected on food label dates to help consumers further stretch their food budgets at a time of high prices, ReFED’s Gunders says.
“So if this is something that has bothered you in the past,” she adds, now is the time “for people to actually write in and say, ‘Yes, this is confusing – we want some clarity. ‘”
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