Thursday, December 19, 2013

Information About Food Expiration & Sell-By Dates

By Keren Kipfer


Every time you purchase a drink or food product, do you read the labels and possibly consider looking into important details such as expiration dates? For many of us, buying a product near its expiration date is not to be considered, but often these dates are misunderstood. Here are a few quick facts that might help you know what food is edible near and passed these dates.

If you want to be a wise consumer you need to be conscious about expiration dates for products like food, beverages and different types of medicine. When you have the itch to throw away stuff with dates that seem to have passed try to consider this first: that in some cases the dates that are printed are not necessarily stating that the item is now unsafe and not edible. For some products though, the expiration date is literal and required by the government and this includes items for infants and toddlers, such as formula and jarred baby food. When the expiration date has passed, these items should be tossed away.

Perishable products like milk, beef and other meat products, poultry as well as seafood have what is known as a sell-by dates. The stores must sell these perishables by this date, but they are generally still perfectly able to sit in your fridge for a couple of days and still be used. You can even freeze meats that are a day or two passed the sell-by dates. If everything looks and tastes fresh, the food is probably still ok to consume.

As for shelf-stable items like canned foods, boxed food products like macaroni and cheese, mayonnaise and many more similar items, "best if used by" or "use by" dates are being used. Manufacturers of such products use such detail in order to convey to consumers that in fact their product will have its best taste before the date stated but is nearly always edible and safe passed this date. If in case you are a bit in doubt about whether or not to consume a product, the best tool for you to use is still your sense of smell and taste.

The machines that make it possible for the fast printing of these expiration dates on your packages of foods and beverages are known as id coders. These machines also are responsible for printing serial and batch numbers. These numbers are added at the end of the production process and manufacturers can then leave it to these special coder printers to complete the task in a fast manner, but these coders also are used because they can print on surfaces such as plastic, glass and aluminum without smearing. As to the brands, you will easily find the likes of Domino coders, VideoJet coders and Imaje coders.

Replacement inks and make-up for these id coders are always needed by companies using coders. But you should know that making such purchase from your coder's manufacturer could be quite costly. What you need in order to save money is to find a special product id company selling generic versions of such inks. When you find them, you will delight in the fact that they sell generic versions of Domino ink, Imaje ink, Willett ink as well as other brands at great quality but at a much lower cost.




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