Two powerful advocacy groups have unified to convince regulators and supermarkets to end the use-by dates that cost Australian households thousands of dollars a year.
The Fight Food Waste Cooperative Research Centre and Stop Food Waste Australia are pooling their resources to become End Food Waste Australia — hoping to halve food waste by 2030.
Chief operating officer Mark Barthel said best-before dates encouraged people to bin food even though it was edible, contributing to the 7.6 million tonnes — or $36 billion worth — of wasted food.
“That’s like filling the MCG about 10 times full of food every year,” Mr Barthel said.
But Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) say they have no plans to change.
Why the best-before date?
First introduced in Australia in the 1970s, best-before and use-by dates set the standard for food safety in supermarkets, and are regulated by Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ).
But Mr Barthel said they could be misleading for consumers, particularly on fresh produce.
“Our hope is that some of those best-before dates will be removed … so that people are able to exercise their common sense about whether fresh produce is good to eat or not,” he said.
Under the FSANZ rules, foods should not be eaten after the use-by date and cannot be legally sold, but products past their best-before date can be sold if still fit for human consumption.
Mr Barthel said, for fresh fruit and vegetables, food safety was only an issue once produce was cut.
“In the UK, a lot of best-before dates have been stripped off of the uncut fresh produce, and a lot more focus has been put into providing advice to consumers around how to store that fruit and veg properly,” he said.
Can the date be changed?
Only Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) can change whether best-before dates are required on products.
In a statement to the ABC, FSANZ said there were “no plans to change the best-before or use-by date marking requirements in the Food Standards Code”.
But Mr Barthel hoped the new unified approach would help change that, inspired by the UK model introduced by not-for-profit group WRAP, which saw best-before dates removed from thousands of fresh food products.
Executive director of WRAP Asia Pacific Claire Kneller said their research had shown about 18 per cent of household food waste was influenced by the date.
“The work that WRAP has done in the UK demonstrated that a lot of food was being wasted in people’s homes because of date labelling” Ms Kneller said.
“There’s no food safety issue. We want to encourage people to use their senses to determine whether or not something is going to be good to eat.”
Ms Kneller said there was a project running with FSANZ to change the “interpretation of the current suite of rules”.
Could it work?
Mr Barthel said fresh fruit and vegetables represented about 50 per cent of total wasted food, but acknowledged most of that happened before produce left the farm.
But he said wholesalers and retailers could also help in this scenario by offering deals and discounts to consumers.
Mr Barthel said other countries had sought to tackle that issue by purchasing an entire crop.
“The customer will buy the whole of the crop and the grade A, the really good stuff, will sit in the supermarket aisle or be presented to a restaurant kitchen,” he said.
“Grade B might go into pies, pizzas, things like that and grade C could be in soups, sauces, juices, smoothies.”
What will supermarkets do?
Only FSANZ can change the guidelines supermarkets follow.
A spokesperson for Aldi said the supermarket had “no planned changes to food labelling”.
Woolworths and Coles said they would support any “sensible” and “considered” industry reform.
Woolworths and Coles are signatories to the Australian Food Pact, which is a multi-year commitment to reduce food waste and work to implement change at scale.
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