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Comment by loosetypes | Hacker News Reader

It's good that the less shopper-favorable produce is put to use, but I'm always curious about the somewhat analogous-to-ugly-fruits case with milk: Looking at the dairy fridge and choosing solely by expiration date.

Naturally, I choose the latest to expire to maximize my options within the consumption time-frame. And I think everyone does?

But do you actually care about food waste if every time you make that decision the earlier-stocked milks that are still around, and set to expire sooner, are pretty much guaranteed to not be purchased?

I guess I have no idea of the scale here, or even how much is wasted. It just seems like there would naturally be some sort of price-tiering of dairy products based on expiry to incentivize what might be a better overall consumption.

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Products nearing the best before date are typically sold at a discount at least where I’m from. And those that don’t get sold but are still edible get increasingly donated to the needy instead of just being thrown away. There’s a big movement going on to reduce retail waste. In France grocery stores are required by law to donate food that doesn’t get sold.

I always remember that Noah's Bagels would make certain to throw away excess bagels at the end of the day. It's probably, unfortunately, America-specific, but when I asked why staff said if they gave away "old" baked-goods and someone were to get sick they would be liable to lawsuit.

Generally speaking, there are Good Samaritan laws that avoid that. The issue more often is that stores don't want to deal with the headaches that can stem from being a place for those who are unhoused to congregate for free food. It's rarely good for business.

Usually though (in France at least) it's not the shop giving out free bagels at the back after they close down, they hand the leftovers to local associations that do the redistribution part.

I know a bakery operator who said the health code required throwing away unsold baked goods with butter content at the end of the day, when I asked him about donating to the homeless.

It's not evil or stupid. It's the law.

I'd want to see a specific law citation before I believe that. I'm sure you're trying to report what he said accurately, but he may have been misleading or mistaken.

"The food shall be cooked and served, served if ready to eat, or discarded within 4 hours from the point in time when the food is removed from temperature control;"

https://www.ehso.uic.edu/UserFiles/Servers/Server_82316/File... pg 36

It's in a different state (each has their own code), but it'll do.

That only applies to "potentially hazardous food". A baked good doesn't fit the definition. Butter in the recipe doesn't matter. A cream filling might, so perhaps that caused some confusion?

Also "four hours" isn't really an "end of the day" thing... And if they're in temperature control at the end of the day, then four hours is plenty of time to get them distributed and consumed.

Baked goods, like cakes, are made fresh each morning. They are served at room temperature. At the end of the day, they are thrown out because the health code says so. 4 hours is the Illinois limit.

Here's an FDA list of TCS (Temperature Controlled for Safety) foods:

https://www.education.ne.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/List...

Note butter, whipped cream, eggs, all part of frosting and fillings for baked goods.

Here's the 4 hour window again:

https://www.statefoodsafety.com/Resources/article/category/R...

From a chemical standpoint: butter/eggs mixed with sugar (even if it's cooked) is substantially different and more likely to spoil than butter/egg mixed with flour and cooked.

You should throw out cakes and cream puffs. You can donate bagels and challah bread.

The section you cite applies to 'potentially hazardous foods', which generally are foods held at hot or cold temperature, not baked goods held at room temperature (even baked goods with butter in them).

I'm HACCP Certified: That's an odd interpretation of the law. From the section you're quoting:

"If time only, rather than time in conjunction with temperature, is used as the public health control for a working supply of potentially hazardous food before cooking, or for ready-to-eat potentially hazardous food that is displayed or held for service for immediate consumption"

Many baked goods are not considered "potentially hazardous foods". Things filled or frosted fall into a different grouping, but most plain breads (even those including eggs or butter) are shelf stable for days. They suffer a sever drop in culinary quality (ie; stale) but they don't suffer a drop in culinary safety.

Maybe the guy is extremely risk averse, maybe his area has a very zealous food safety department, but it seems like he's not super interested in trying to make this happen (which is fine, he can spend his time doing whatever he want).

A law can be evil and or stupid...

It's unfortunately a popularly repeated belief it's just FUD without any supporting evidence. Usually the real answer is simply that it's cheaper to discard.

A bakery will still try to optimize supply and demand as much as possible; machine learning algorithms can help with things like that as well (predicting demand). For a bagel shop it'll also help if they can produce something on short notice.

Of course, said shops will also need to have something on display at all times to lure customers in, so there will always be some waste. As long as the percentage of waste remains low it should be fine. Besides, food waste isn't too bad for the environment (relatively), it's fully biodegradable.

It's often about incentives. Why buy if you can wait until the shop is about to close and get it for free? Or as an employee, why care about food wastage if it gives you lot of free goods you can take home?

>>Naturally, I choose the latest to expire to maximize my options within the consumption time-frame. And I think everyone does?

I certainly used to, but now that I have a toddler that consumes an unreal amount of milk, I just buy whatever's at the front. It'll be gone in 4 days regardless.

That's just it; everyone should buy according to what they use. I'm sure there's a lot of people that only buy milk by the gallon, accepting that they have to toss it by the end of the week regardless of how much has been used.

This is of course also because big quantities are cheaper; when buying milk or most produce really, the cost isn't in the product itself, it's in the packaging, handling, shipping and refrigerating.

> Naturally, I choose the latest to expire to maximize my options within the consumption time-frame. And I think everyone does?

No, I've never done this for milk. I just take the first one on the shelf and trust the supermarket to sell me milk that will last for a few weeks. I don't really look at the price, either. I'm going to buy it anyway so it doesn't seem like very valuable information (same for other staples like bread, rice, butter, etc.)

In the very rare case when the supermarket makes a mistake with expiration dates (maybe once every 10 years), you can just take it back and get some more milk. It would be a very minor inconvenience, so I don't worry about it.

This is just bad produce management from the shops.

Longer-Expiry products at the back, newer at the front.

But I know at my local supermarkets nobody gives a shit, Frequently I'll buy the same product twice in a row, and the item on the second day expires before the one on the first.

All their staff just chucks the new shit at the front. The milk is even worse, as they just combine the half-empty early-date trollies and wheel out a fresh late-date one.

I'd say it all gets sold. But I have a /marvellous/ view of their bins. They throw so much stuff out.

But they are all sold for the same price, and it takes about 1 second to reach for the back of the shelf. There's nothing stopping this, and I refuse to pay the same price for an inferior product. There should be automatically applied increasing discounts as the product approaches the expiration date, so there's some reason beyond laziness to pick the less fresh ones.

> I refuse to pay the same price for an inferior product.

Even if you're going to use it long before the date matters, so you get an identical experience anyway?

> There should be automatically applied increasing discounts as the product approaches the expiration date, so there's some reason beyond laziness to pick the less fresh ones.

That sounds like a bunch of labor that will make things more expensive. If they really want to trade effort for getting two-day-older stock cleared out, they can just let the shelf get closer to empty before restocking.

Sounds like poor management TBH; they can know exactly how much milk they need to stock to minimize waste.

But there's a balance between maximizing sales with more safety stock and minimizing waste with less, because of uneven demand fluctuations.

Ah, but if the 2-pint jugs of standard semi-skimmed milk are out of stock, maybe you buy the 1-pint or the 4-pint or the organic.

The customer response depends on both the product category and the time of day, for obvious reasons. And I guarantee the likes of Wal-Mart will have run studies on this and chosen the optimal ordering level for milk in their stores.

I have never done this, and I gently suggest you stop. Do you really need those extra few days of milk expiration? If the milk with the soonest expiration date was the only one available, would you buy it or just walk out without milk? A good rule to avoid tragedy of the commons situations is to think “what if everyone did as I do?”. This is a pretty classic example here.

I do this and the main reason is that milk with the greatest number of days has also been on the shelf for the least amount of time and consequently has probably had fewer things happen to it - like the refrigerator door being left open and the milk being warmed (slightly).

For other items I reach in and take items from behind the first row for similar reasons since the retailer may have put returned items (which might be slightly spoiled or damaged) up front. This is also the reason I never take the last item of anything.

So there's more too it than simple expiration dates. Retailer subterfuge is also a factor.

Thank you for your reply, I will try to adjust my behavior.

Depends where you live and your household consumption . In Sweden milk expires usually 3-7 days after you buy it. If you are alone and don't drink that much, it does make a big difference buying the one that expires in 7 days vs the one in 3-4 days (there is no discount except if it expires 1 day after purchasing)

Very true. The last milk I bought was Darigold here in the US, and the sell-by date was sometime in March.

I don't know what they're doing to extend its shelf life so much, but as a childless sometimes-uses-milk home, I love it, and couldn't care less about the exact dates.

Maybe you bought UHT milk? That has a shelf life of months.

Yup, learned something. thanks!

Ultra pasteurized simply means that the milk has been heated under pressure at a higher temperature for a shorter period of time (280° for two seconds versus 167° at 15 seconds for standard pasteurized).

- http://www.darigold.com/faqs

> In Sweden milk expires usually 3-7 days after you buy it.

What's the typical date on it, relative to purchase and expiration?

In the US milk is usually given a sell-by of three weeks after pasteurization, and actually lasts almost a week beyond that.

Though it depends some on fridge temperature, could...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15553644 https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/65579/why-do-fri... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1541-4337.12... huh.

Do you really need those extra few days of milk expiration?

Absolutely. Even when getting the milk with the farthest away expiration data I rarely end up finishing a whole carton of milk until 1 or 2 days after that date. Without those few extra days, half the milk risks getting poured down the sink.

If the milk with the soonest expiration date was the only one available, would you buy it or just walk out without milk?

If I didn't really need milk that day, I'd almost certainly skip it. If really needed milk I'd buy it and possibly end up pouring half of it down the sink because I almost never manage to use a whole carton of milk in 3-4 days

Milk goes bad much quicker once opened though, check if they have smaller bottles available. It's often more expensive per liter but at least it doesn't end up in the sink.

>Do you really need those extra few days of milk expiration?

The only thing I use milk for is in my morning coffee. I usually buy half liter cartons and even then I often end up with the milk going bad before I'm through with it. So yeah, I do.

Why not buy creamer packets?

Because they taste terrible. Plus, I'm not convinced that this is environmentally friendly.

I'd imagine because they like milk in their coffee, not creamer.

To add to your point, I notice many people obey expiry dates in a strangely strict manner. I regularly consume dairy products (including milk) that are 5-7 days past their expiry date. If it looks/smells/tastes fine, just use it. I don't even remember a dairy product ever going bad in my fridge. I've heard people say they immediately throw away things like yogurt as soon as the expiry date passed, which I find totally ridiculous.

When I was single, yeah. I regularly had to pour out milk I didn't have time to drink before it went bad.

Now that I have a kid, I'm happy to buy the discounted short-expiration-date stuff since it'll be gone in 2 days no matter what.

I also have this more general problem of struggling to use what I buy before it goes bad. Some of the worst offenders are items that are prepackaged, spoil too quickly after opening and are sold only in packages that are too large for my needs (e.g. cream).

> Naturally, I choose the latest to expire to maximize my options within the consumption time-frame. And I think everyone does?

I have recently started to deliberately mix ages when I see a variation, knowing that at least some of it will be consumed pretty soon and order will be assured by the way I arrange out fridge contents. It feels unjustifiably good.

It doesn't applies to every products (and it's probably different depending on which country you live in) but you also have to check if it's a "best before" or a "used by" date. I've ate dairy products 1-2 weeks after the "best before" date and they were exactly like the day I bought them. If it doesn't smell / looks funky it's usually fine to eat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expiration_date

This seems flawed in that you're encouraging companies to produce milk that lasts longer above all else. I'd rather they prioritize quality. If there's a brand that tastes better to me, I'm likely to buy their milk over milk that lasts longer. My impressions of how each company treats their livestock and the size/locality of the company plays a part, too, but my knowledge there is limited.

To ensure it doesn't go bad, I purchase in smaller quantities. I'm unlikely to buy a full gallon of milk at once.

What I do is, if I’m going to buy 4-6 pcs, I take 2-3 with the furthest date and the rest older, depending on the dates and my projected needs.

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