Uniform expiration date language can help feed California’s hungry

OPINION – At the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, which serves the most populous county in the country, we help feed millions of people living in LA County who face food insecurity. Yet up to 40 percent of the food our nation grows never reaches anyone’s table.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by this daunting problem. But there is one simple change that would have a drastic impact. Twenty percent of food waste is caused by consumers confused about expiration dates. We all end up throwing away perfectly good food because we are misled by labels that make us think it has expired.

These phrases can refer to when an item has hit its peak quality, when it is no longer safe to eat, or in the case of “sell-by,” when the date is purely meant to support stock rotation at a grocery store. Food banks like us see this daily when our clients are afraid to take the food that we offer for fear of making their families sick because it is past its “sell-by” date. 

Not only do different brands use different terms to mean the same thing, but some brands even use the same terms differently across their product lines. Standardizing “expiration date” terminology across brands can be so impactful that a report from ReFED, a national nonprofit focused on food waste, found it to be the single most cost-effective thing we can do to prevent waste.

For their part, the manufacturers have largely agreed with both the problem and the solution. After California implemented voluntary date-label standards in 2017, the Consumer Brands Association published a report endorsing the streamlined terms. The report – “Best if Clearly Labeled” – showed the results of consumer polling, which overwhelmingly indicated the average person anticipated throwing away less and saving more money.

However, voluntary efforts by the industry won’t cut it. Years after industry groups endorsed the standard label terms, grocery shelves, and kitchen cabinets are filled with products whose labels are inconsistent with those standards. And soon, many of those products will be needlessly thrown away.

This year, the Legislature is considering Assembly Bill (AB) 660 by Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, which simply codifies the industry’s existing best practices to mandate uniform expiration phrasing and create an even playing field across manufacturers. 

Years after industry groups endorsed the standard label terms, grocery shelves, and kitchen cabinets are filled with products whose labels are inconsistent with those standards. And soon, many of those products will be needlessly thrown away.

Food banks were among the earliest supporters of the statewide effort to reduce food waste, and this is among the easiest and highest impact solutions. California action would also pave the way for federal legislation with the same standards as AB 660 featured in the Food Date Labeling Act of 2023. Standardization at the national level has the potential to divert almost 800 thousand tons of food per year.

Food waste is about more than feeding people. If emissions from wasted food were a country, it would represent the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, after only the US and China. Another alarming fact: 22% of our freshwater use and 16% of our cropland is used to grow food that is never eaten.

The implementation of California’s landmark organic waste legislation requires the state to recover 20 percent of the edible food that we throw away each year. This law represents a paradigm shift for food banks like ours. Achieving this goal will be much easier with the passage of AB 660, which could put Los Angeles on the forefront of feeding people instead of landfills. 

Redirecting food that would have been wasted to feed hungry people is not a panacea. But there is much more that needs to be done to build an adequate safety net and to tackle the systemic problems that have resulted in 1-in-5 of our neighbors not having enough to eat. And it is low–hanging fruit. 

Derek Polka is the Senior Policy and Research Manager for the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.