Best before vs use by: the date you can ignore

Two dates, printed the same way, on the same kind of label — and Australian food-safety rules only mean one of them literally. "Use by" is a hard stop. "Best before" is not. Most kitchens treat both as the same warning, which is the single most avoidable reason a good tin of tomatoes or a perfectly fine packet of pasta ends up in the bin. One of these two dates is optional. The other is not.

Use by is a safety date

"Use by" appears only on food that becomes a health risk past a certain point. FSANZ and the NSW Food Authority are both explicit that this date is not a suggestion. Fresh milk in Australia carries a use-by date for exactly this reason. Selling food past its use-by date is against the law, and eating it past that date is not a good idea either, regardless of how it looks or smells.

This is the one date where "it looks fine" does not count for anything.

Best before is a quality date

"Best before" is a manufacturer’s estimate of peak quality — flavour, texture, colour — not a safety cutoff. Food past its best-before date is not automatically unsafe. It may simply not be at its absolute best. Tinned goods, dry pasta, biscuits and most pantry staples carry best-before dates specifically because they stay safe well past that point, even though a manufacturer would rather you bought a fresh one.

This is the date behind most of the "am I allowed to eat this" hesitation in a kitchen, and it is also the date where that hesitation is mostly unearned.

Telling the two apart

The label already tells you which one you are looking at. "Use by" or "best before" is printed as part of the date itself, not something to work out. Past a best-before date, the call is yours to make on normal senses: smell, look, texture. Past a use-by date, there is no call to make.

The mistake worth dropping is applying use-by caution to best-before food. A tin of tomatoes two months past its best-before date is not a safety gamble. It is a quality question, and probably still a perfectly good tin of tomatoes.

Where this saves the most food

This distinction pays off most on pantry and long-life items, precisely because that is where best-before dates dominate. A cupboard full of tins and dry goods sitting past date does not need clearing into the bin. Most of it is still fine, and worth a smell-and-look check rather than an automatic toss.

It matters less for the short-window items. Milk and raw chicken both carry use-by dates for good reason, and the general shelf-life guide already treats them with the caution they need, regardless of which label is printed.

Why the confusion persists

Both dates look identical on the pack — a day, a month, a year, printed the same size in the same corner. Nothing on the label signals that one is a hard stop and the other is a guess, so the caution that belongs on "use by" spreads onto "best before" by default. That default is not an unreasonable habit to have picked up. It is just more conservative than it needs to be, and conservative-by-default is exactly the kind of small, repeated decision that quietly inflates a household’s $2,500-a-year waste figure.

Pantry is built to apply this distinction automatically, item by item, because a single household fridge and pantry usually hold both kinds of date at once. The same CSIRO and Australian food-safety guidance behind this post will sit behind every item pulled off a scanned receipt — so a carton of milk will be treated as the safety date it is, and a tin of chickpeas will not be thrown out on caution it never needed.