Use By, Best Before and Open Life: Getting Date Labelling Right Behind the Scenes

Two of the dates in your kitchen mean completely different things in law. The third one - the one your team invents - is the one an inspector will press hardest on.

Date labelling looks like a small clerical job and behaves like a legal fault line. Two of the dates in your kitchen come from the supplier and mean different things in law. The third - the date your own team writes on a decanted tub - is invented on site, and it is the one an environmental health officer will press hardest on, because it is the only one you have to justify yourself.

Use by is a safety date

A 'use by' date is applied to food that is microbiologically highly perishable and therefore likely, after a short period, to present an immediate danger to human health. Food past its use-by date is deemed unsafe in law, and selling or serving it is an offence. It does not matter that it looks fine, smells fine, or that the chef would happily eat it, and it applies just as much to using it as an ingredient in something else. Freezing before the use-by date is permitted and stops the clock, provided the item is labelled with the date it was frozen and treated as a new product with its own defrosted shelf life once it comes out.

Best before is a quality date

A 'best before' date relates to quality, not safety. Dried goods, tinned products and most ambient lines carry one. Selling food after its best-before date is not automatically an offence, but the food must still be safe and must not be misleadingly described, and once the date has passed the burden of judging quality sits with you. Most kitchens treat a passed best-before as a prompt to check and decide rather than as an automatic bin. That is a reasonable position, provided somebody is genuinely making the decision and recording it.

Open life is where the risk actually sits

Once you open a vacuum pack, decant a sauce, cook a batch for the fridge or portion a chilled product, the supplier's date no longer applies. You are now the one setting a shelf life. That secondary shelf life must be shorter than the original, justified by your HACCP-based procedures, and applied consistently. Many businesses use the two-day rule that runs through Food Standards Agency Safer Food, Better Business materials - the day of opening or preparation counts as day one, so something opened on Monday is used by the end of Tuesday. For higher-risk chilled foods that is a defensible default. Anything longer needs a reason you can explain: supplier guidance, a validated process, or shelf-life testing.

• Label at the moment of opening or decanting, not at the end of the shift
• Write both dates - when it was opened or made, and when it must be used by
• Use one labelling system across the whole site so an agency chef can read it
• Never top up a container without emptying and cleaning it first; a topped-up tub carries the oldest food under the newest date
• Check dates on the daily fridge and freezer round, not only at delivery

What gets you marked down

Inspectors rarely find a kitchen with no labels at all. They find inconsistency: handwritten labels on some containers and none on others, ambiguous date formats, a chiller of unlabelled tubs on a Sunday because the person who normally does it was off, or a documented two-day rule that the fridge plainly contradicts. A written procedure your practice does not match is worse than no procedure, because it shows you knew the standard and did not meet it.

Zynthio puts date checking where it belongs - in the routine rather than in someone's memory. Date and stock rotation checks sit in the daily opening and closing checklists alongside the fridge and freezer temperature records, so the same round that captures a chiller reading also confirms that labelled stock is in date. Where something is found out of date, the corrective action and the disposal are recorded against the check with a time stamp and the name of the person who did it, and the history exports with your temperature logs. When an officer asks how you control secondary shelf life, you can show the rule and the evidence that it was followed.