I remember seeing a sell by date on salt. It was at that moment that I started questioning the process.
Luckily the packaging had started to biodegrade, too, so it was easy enough to scrape off the fiber fuzz and hammer down the inner salt rocks into something useful. Better than nothing! But I wish I’d been able to buy it by its sell-by.
(Spoken as a skeptic of deadlines of all sorts, and one who routinely ignores food safety. I still think the dates are mostly silly, but that type of instance reminds me why it’s a hard problem: even if you’re not a dastardly wastemonger, choosing the “right” date depends heavily on handling and climate and factors beyond your control—unknowable at production time.)
My broader point, I guess, is that the appropriate date to sell something by depends so heavily on factors unknowable at production time that it’s hard to guess. But also that apparently-shelf-stable goods can in fact degrade.
And I guess that it’s kind of weird and unnatural the way modern industrial packaging/processing have trained us to expect that a given product should be interchangeable with any other until an arbitrary date.
For salt, that seems somewhat silly, but not enough to make me fundamentally distrust the rationale
It does seem to go “flat” after a few months regardless, even when the expiry date is 2 years in the future.
Then they switched to 30 days recommendation to goose sales.
A sell by date makes perfect sense on salt. No packager wants to be responsible for material that sat on someone else's shelf for years and years.