Morrisons, the UK retailer, scraps 'use by' date on milk in favour of sniff test

A large number of UK consumers don't understand the difference between 'best before' and 'use by', this sadly won't make as much difference as it could.

> British home cooks threw away a whopping 720m eggs in 2018[0], with one in three saying they will bin any carton that is out of date. Yet eggs in the UK carry a best-before date, not a use-by.

> All those discarded eggs show that most people still don’t understand the difference. If 74% of respondents to a 2016 Women’s Institute (WI) survey knew that “use by” was about safety, only 45% knew that “best before” wasn’t. The waste reduction charity Wrap has found that as much as 30% of the food binned for being “past date” had a best-before; ie, it probably didn’t need to be binned.

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/apr/17/the-truth-about...

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/apr/09/britons-throw-a...

So are customers supposed to sniff the milk in the store? Wouldn't it be sealed and if not, have a huge risk of bacteria getting in and spoiling it before it would otherwise go bad?

Doesn't seem very well thought through to me.