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Comment by nikolay | Hacker News Reader

Many foods are unregulated. It's strange that milk, for example, doesn't have any requirements for its expiration date. One brand widened their "best buy" date and I noticed their milk was souring 3 days before the "best buy" date. After contacting them several times, I told them that they gave me no option but to escalate this to authorities, they didn't seem concerned a bit, and after doing my research, I found out that they can put anything on the label without repercussions. The manufacturer even recommended the record stupid stuff like using the milk in smoothies and other odor and taste masking means to make it "best." So, even "best buy" for foods that can make you sick is meaningless!

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> It's strange that milk, for example, doesn't have any requirements for its expiration date.

Why should it? It won't do you any harm. Just don't buy from suppliers who lie to you. But surely if it went sour before the Best before Date then the supplier has supplied goods that were not of merchantable quality and not in accordance with the implied contract and has failed to uphold their side of the contract.

But surely your complaint should be directed against the shop that sold it to you? I would expect the shop to either refund or replace the goods.

I agree. It's a dishonest practice, which was a misguided reaction to their having a lot of unsold milk. I didn't mention it, but this is raw milk. Honestly, I never had their milk go bad, unlike pasteurized milk, but it just gets extremely smelly and sour, so it's far from "best"!

All the grocery stores in my area will full refund the purchase if it goes bad before the best by date. By returning it to the store you purchased it from, it gets marked as a defective return. When that rate hits a certain percentage they will stop carrying the product.

I think that's why they made this gimmick, because they had a lot of unsold milk. People buy their milk by half gallon as smaller packaging is extremely expensive. They have a pretty stupid policy - instead of having honest and reciprocal pricing, they make only 1/2-gallon best-price per volume, which leads to lots of unsold milk as who would be such big quantity a couple of days before expiration when it's probably already soured and unsuitable as fluid milk. And I suggested all these ina very friendly manner, but they didn't change. So, I switched to a more honest product, plus, I'd rather not us have raw milk when the bird flu is gaining grounds pretty quickly.

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