Best By vs Use By: Food Expiration Dates Explained (2026)

Americans throw away roughly 80 billion pounds of food every year, and a huge chunk of that is perfectly good food tossed because someone saw a date on the package and assumed it meant "toxic after this day." The confusion between best by vs use by dates is the main culprit — most food expiration date labels have nothing to do with safety. They're about quality.

Understanding the difference can save you hundreds of dollars a year in wasted groceries. It can also mean fewer guilt-ridden trips to the trash can with a full container of yogurt that was probably still fine. What follows is a breakdown of what those dates actually mean, which ones matter, and which ones you can safely ignore.

Best By vs Use By: They Mean Different Things

There are four date labels you'll see on food packaging in the U.S., and they each mean something different:

• Best By — a quality indicator. The manufacturer thinks the product will taste best before this date. Has nothing to do with safety.
• Use By — the one that actually matters for safety, mainly applied to perishable items like dairy and fresh meat. This is the closest thing to a real deadline.
• Sell By — a date for the retailer, not for you. It tells the store when to rotate stock off the shelf. It has zero consumer-facing safety meaning.
• Freeze By — a suggestion to freeze the product before this date if you want to preserve its best quality. Again, about quality, not danger.

Out of all four, only "Use By" carries any real safety implication. The rest are quality guidelines set by the manufacturer — and they tend to be conservative, because no brand wants you to eat their product on an off day and blame them.

What Each Date Actually Tells You

Best By is the manufacturer's estimate of when the product hits peak flavor and texture. A bag of chips past its best-by date isn't going to make you sick — it might just be slightly stale. Canned tomatoes a month past the date? Taste exactly the same. Food is almost always safe well beyond this label.

Use By is the closest thing to a hard deadline. You'll see it on dairy, deli meat, fresh juice, and other highly perishable items. These products can harbor harmful bacteria once they pass their prime, so this date deserves more respect than the others.

Sell By is the most misunderstood label. People see it and think the food is done. In reality, roughly one-third of a product's total safe shelf life remains after the sell-by date. That gallon of milk with yesterday's sell-by date? It's probably good for another week in your fridge.

Foods That Last Well Past Their Dates

Some foods are basically indestructible. These are the items you can feel good about keeping long after the printed date:

• Canned goods2 to 5 years past the date as long as the can is undamaged, not bulging, and not rusted through. Canned corn from 2023? Still fine.
• Dried pasta1 to 2 years past its date. It's just dried flour and water. Store it sealed and it lasts ages.
• HoneyLiterally never expires. Archaeologists have found edible honey in Egyptian tombs. If it crystallizes, warm it gently and it's good as new.
• Hard cheesesParmesan, cheddar, gouda. If you see mold, trim off at least an inch around the spot and the rest is perfectly safe to eat.
• Eggs — 3 to 5 weeks past the sell-by date if kept refrigerated. Want to test them? Fill a bowl with water. If the egg sinks, it's good. If it floats, toss it. The float test works because older eggs develop gas inside as they age.
• Condiments — ketchup, mustard, and hot sauce last months past their best-by dates. Their high acidity and preservative content keep bacteria at bay.
• Frozen foods — safe indefinitely from a bacterial standpoint. Quality declines over time (freezer burn, texture changes), but a frozen chicken breast from eight months ago won't hurt you.

Foods You Should Respect the Date On

Not everything gets a free pass. Some foods carry real risks after their dates, and pushing your luck isn't worth the food poisoning:

• Raw meat and poultry — use it or freeze it within 1 to 2 days of purchase. Chicken especially can harbor salmonella and campylobacter, and those bacteria multiply fast once the meat is past its prime.
• Deli meats — these carry a real listeria risk. Listeria can grow even at refrigerator temperatures, which makes deli meat one of the riskier items in your fridge. Eat within 3 to 5 days of opening.
• Soft cheeses — brie, ricotta, cream cheese. Unlike hard cheese where you can cut off mold, soft cheese lets bacteria penetrate throughout. Don't risk it.
• Fresh berries — they mold fast and can develop harmful bacteria quickly once they start breaking down.
• Unpasteurized juice — without pasteurization, harmful bacteria like E. coli can multiply rapidly after the use-by date.
• Baby formula — this is the only food product in the U.S. that is federally required to carry a use-by date. The nutrients degrade past that date, and the safety standards are strict for good reason. Never use expired formula.

How to Tell If Food Has Actually Gone Bad

Your senses are more reliable than a date stamp. Before you toss something based solely on the label, check for actual signs of spoilage:

• Off smell — sour, rancid, or just "wrong." Your nose evolved to detect spoilage. Trust it.
• Visible mold — on bread, soft fruit, soft cheese, or leftovers, mold means it's done. (Hard cheese is the exception — trim and eat.)
• Slimy texture — deli meat, chicken, or vegetables that feel slippery or slimy have bacterial growth on the surface.
• Unusual color — gray ground beef, green-tinged chicken, or yellowed greens are all signs of breakdown.
• Bloated packaging — if a sealed container is puffed up, that's gas produced by bacteria inside. Don't open it. Just throw it out.

When in doubt, throw it out. But a printed date alone — without any of these signs — is not a reason to trash perfectly good food.

Reducing Food Waste at Home

Once you stop treating every date label as a death sentence, you can build habits that actually cut waste:

• Shop with a plan. Buy what you'll actually cook this week. The biggest source of food waste is impulse purchases that sit in the fridge until they rot.
• First in, first out. When you unpack groceries, move older items to the front of the fridge and put new purchases behind them. Restaurants do this. You should too.
• Freeze what you won't use in time. Bread, meat, cheese, even milk — most things freeze well. If you know you won't finish it before it turns, freeze it on day one, not day five.
• Label your leftovers. A piece of tape with the date goes a long way. Mystery containers in the back of the fridge are almost always the first to get tossed.
• "Ugly" produce is perfectly fine. A bumpy tomato or a crooked carrot tastes exactly the same. Cosmetic imperfections are not spoilage.

Date confusion isn't limited to the kitchen, either. The same kind of misunderstanding happens with medication expiration dates — people toss perfectly effective medicine because the label says it's "expired" when the medication is often still potent years later. And if you want a broader view of all the things in your life that quietly expire, our full list of things that expire covers everything from passports to batteries.

The Bottom Line on Food Dates

Food date labels in the U.S. are largely unregulated. There is no federal law requiring date labels on any food product except baby formula. States have a patchwork of their own rules, but there's no national standard. That means the date on your jar of peanut butter is whatever the manufacturer decided to print — and they almost always err on the conservative side because a stale product is worse for their brand than a discarded one.

The industry is slowly moving toward simplification. The push is to standardize everything down to just two labels: "Best If Used By" for quality and "Use By" for safety. That would eliminate the sell-by confusion entirely and give consumers a clearer signal about what actually matters.

Until that happens, the rule of thumb is simple: use common sense over arbitrary dates. Check the food, not just the label. Your nose knows more than a printed stamp. And the next time you're about to throw out a carton of eggs because the date was yesterday, do the float test first. You'll probably be eating omelets, not filling the trash bag.

For official food safety guidance, the USDA food safety page has detailed storage and handling recommendations. The FDA food product dating guide explains how date labels are regulated (or not) at the federal level. For a broader view of everything in your home that expires, check our warranty expiration guide.