Trust your senses rather than the best-before date: food surplus app developers

Hands up if you check the date on a food product before cooking with it or consuming it?

That’s a best-before date.

It’s actually got nothing to do with the food’s safety. It’s just the food industry’s way of saying consuming after the date doesn’t guarantee the same flavour or texture.

The folks behind food surplus app Too Good to Go are also behind a partnership to get consumers to trust their own senses before throwing food out.

The campaign is called Look-Smell-Taste.

“What we are doing is introducing a new label onto packaged goods that says, ‘Look-Smell-Taste,’ and when you do that, you are going to be saving a lot of money and you are going to throw out a lot less food, because you are going to be using that food based on your senses rather than basing on the date,” says the food app’s Sarah Soteroff.

According to Second Harvest, 60 per cent of food produced for Canadians is lost and wasted annually.

Studies show almost half of the food Canadians waste occurs at a household level. That amounts to $400 a year per Canadian household.

Second Harvest says a third of that wasted food is edible.

The misunderstanding of best-before dates was the subject of a federal committee last summer. It determined the dates are leading Canadians to prematurely throw food away, and this is contributing to food insecurity.

A member of the committee — a delegate from Second Harvest — even suggested doing away with best-before dates.

But that’s not what Too Good to Go is advocating.

“What we are looking to do is not replace that date, but keep that date there. We’ve worked with Health Canada on the regulations around why the dates are there, what they indicate, what they mean,” says Soteroff.

She admits older Canadians grew up following the ‘when in doubt throw it out’ motto.

“That is actually the reverse of what we want to do. That slogan came in about 50 years ago, and since then we’ve seen an improvement in packaging and an improvement in storage.”

She says getting Canadians to smell and look at the food in question shouldn’t be that hard since we already make judgement calls on our produce – which doesn’t come with sticker dates.

“A perfect example is an avocado or a head of lettuce. You look at it, you touch it. We already do this with produce. Now we are just asking people to take that practice and apply it to a wider variety of products.”

The Look-Smell-Taste labels were rolled out on 500 brands in Europe five years ago.

Here in Canada, the labels will be seen on a mix of local and international brands: The Laughing Cow (Bel Group), Greenhouse, Sunny Fruit, Kopi Thyme, Capel Foods, Flirt, Sacred Snacks (based in Vancouver), Righteous Gelato, Barry Callebaut, and Healtea.