'Sell by' was never a safety date, and California just took it off the shelf

On July 1, 2026, the phrase "sell by" became illegal in California on any food item manufactured on or after that date, and the state narrowed the wording of quality and safety dates down to a short approved list at the same time. The law that did it, AB 660 , was signed in September 2024 and gave the industry about a year and nine months to get ready, and when I finally read why the state bothered, the part that stuck with me wasn't the new wording at all. It was that "sell by" was never written for me in the first place.

The date is talking to the store, not to you

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says this plainly, and I had never gone and read it. On its Food Product Dating page, the Food Safety and Inspection Service writes that a "Sell-By" date "tells the store how long to display the product for sale for inventory management," and then adds, in its own words, "It is not a safety date." A "Best if Used By/Before" date "indicates when a product will be of best flavor or quality," and it is not a purchase or safety date either. Even "Use-By," which sounds like the strictest of the three, is described as the last date recommended while the food is at peak quality, and it isn't a safety date except on infant formula.

The bigger surprise is what sits underneath all of it. "Except for infant formula, product dating is not required by federal regulations," the agency writes, and there are "no uniform or universally accepted descriptions used on food labels for open dating in the United States." Nobody in Washington assigned the number on a box of crackers. A company picked it, weighing how long the food sits and at what temperature on its way to the shelf, what the food itself is like, and how it's packaged, and then printed it.

A fifth of what we waste at home comes down to a misread label

The FDA puts a number on the cost of all that confusion, and it isn't small. On its page about cutting food waste , the agency writes that "confusion over date labeling accounts for an estimated 20 percent of consumer food waste," and it puts the national total at between 30 and 40 percent of food in the United States going uneaten, which works out to as much as 20 pounds per person per month and roughly $165 billion a year. Over on the dating page, USDA lands in similar territory, estimating that 30 percent of the food supply is lost or wasted at the retail and consumer levels.

We're also getting worse at this rather than better. A Harris Poll survey conducted for the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, fielded in 2025 among 2,069 U.S. adults and written up by ReFED , found that 43 percent of people say they always or usually throw out food near or past the label date, up from 37 percent in 2016, and that 88 percent do it at least occasionally. Eighty-seven percent believed they knew the meanings of eight different labels, and when the survey actually quizzed them, an average of 53 percent answered correctly. My favorite finding, because it explains all the rest, is that 44 percent think the federal government regulates those phrases, up from 36 percent nine years earlier, when there is no federal standard at all for what they mean.

What California actually changed

The new statute is short and worth knowing. A manufacturer, processor, or retailer that chooses, or is otherwise required by law, to display a date label communicating a quality or safety date on a food item made on or after July 1, 2026 now has to use "BEST if Used by" or "BEST if Used or Frozen by" for the quality date, and "USE by" or "USE by or Freeze by" for the safety date. Selling a food item made on or after that date with "sell by" on it is prohibited, though the law still lets a company print a stock-rotation date in a coded format that shoppers can't easily read, as long as it doesn't use the words "sell by," which is exactly what the phrase was for all along. The exemptions include infant formula, eggs, pasteurized in-shell eggs, and beer and other malt beverages.

Because the rule attaches to when an item was manufactured and not to when it's sold, the shift is going to arrive slowly, and a shelf-stable box made before that date can legally carry the old wording for a long time yet. My own guess, and it's a guess rather than something the law says, is that this ends up changing labels well outside California, since running two versions of one package is more expensive than picking the phrase that's legal in every state.

The refrigerator has its own clock

Reading all of this, it would be easy to walk away thinking the dates are theater and you can ride any of them out. That's the wrong lesson, and the federal storage guidance is where it falls apart, because the clock that matters on the most perishable things in the cart is counted in days at home rather than printed on the front of the package. The Cold Food Storage Chart gives ground beef, ground turkey, and ground chicken just 1 to 2 days in a refrigerator held at 40 degrees F or below, and fresh chicken or turkey the same 1 to 2 days. Steaks, chops, and roasts get 3 to 5 days, cooked leftovers and soups get 3 to 4 days, and raw eggs in the shell get a genuinely long 3 to 5 weeks.

The pound of ground beef is the one worth remembering, because 1 to 2 days in the refrigerator is a very short window next to the 3 to 4 months the same chart gives it in the freezer, and the freezer is right there.

What to use instead of the date

FSIS is direct about what replaces it: with the exception of infant formula, if the date passes during home storage, "a product should still be safe and wholesome if handled properly until the time spoilage is evident," and spoiled food gives itself away through an off odor, flavor, or texture. There's one trap in there worth repeating, because it's the mistake that's easy to make in the other direction. According to the same page, "a change in the color of meat or poultry is not an indicator of spoilage." Beef going dull or brownish in the package isn't the signal, and it never was.

The senses are not a universal instrument either, and the ReFED piece is careful about that, noting that relying on them beats relying on the label in nearly all cases while flagging exceptions such as deli meats and soft cheeses. Those are the two I would still handle by the clock rather than by the sniff test.

So the routine that replaces date-watching isn't complicated. Ground meat and fresh poultry get cooked within a day or two of the trip home, or they go into the freezer that night. Everything else gets smelled and looked at before it gets thrown out, which sounds obvious and is apparently not, given that 43 percent of us say we always or usually throw food out on the strength of a date the manufacturer set at its own discretion.

When the beef needs to be used and there's no plan for it, this is the sort of thing it turns into: baked beans with ground beef , which takes a pound of it plus a chopped onion and a green bell pepper, comes together in about 30 minutes from three cans of baked beans and pantry seasonings, and feeds eight. It keeps 3 to 4 days in the refrigerator after that, which matches what the federal chart says about cooked leftovers, and it freezes for up to 2 months.

The label was never the instrument. Your nose and a storage chart are.