Ask Lemmy

Former head chef who's worked in restaurants and production kitchens here. I made food for both immediate consumption, and package and sale. Food safety regulations will differ by location, as I once worked where three different regional health authorities ovelapped, but this is generally false.

In a commercial kitchens we weren't allowed to sell expired food. The "Best Before" date is different, since it's related to taste/texture, determined through structured testing, best educated guesses and/or personal tasting.

We kept dated boxes of products to taste ourselves every month, but also sent products to a lab to determine if the ingredients degraded or grew enough bacteria in different storage conditions to make it dangerous to consume. One caveat is when product quality degrades faster than it becomes a health risk, sometimes by years. Or, in the case of hard candy, probably never. In that case, companies might pick the longest range of time the product's been tested — and that's why you might see expiry dates on things that shouldn't go bad.

Best before dates are guidelines, expiry dates are rules.