The date stamp on American food packaging has never meant what most people thought it meant. “Sell By,” “Best By,” “Enjoy By,” “Freshest Before” – over the past few decades, manufacturers have coined phrases at will, with no federal regulation requiring consistency and no obligation to explain the difference between a quality indicator and a safety warning. Shoppers were left to guess, and the most cautious guess has always been the same: when in doubt, throw it out.
California just made that guessing game illegal.
On July 1, 2026, California Assembly Bill 660, signed by Governor Newsom on September 28, 2024, takes effect. It makes California the first state in the nation to ban consumer-facing “Sell By” dates on packaged foods. The law doesn’t just remove one phrase from packaging. It rewrites the entire logic of how dates appear on food in California – and quite possibly sets the direction for every other state that follows.
What AB 660 Actually Does
AB 660 requires food manufacturers to use uniform terminology when labeling products with quality or safety dates, and bans the use of consumer-facing “sell by” dates. In practice, that means shoppers browsing California grocery store shelves will no longer encounter a bewildering rotation of phrases that all gesture vaguely at the same concept.
Starting July 1, 2026, the bill prohibits the sale of any food item (except eggs and infant formula) for human consumption in California that is not labeled for quality using the terms “best if used by” or “best if frozen by,” or labeled for food safety using the terms “use by” or “use or freeze by.” Two categories. Two phrases. That’s the whole system.
One category is about flavor and texture. The other is an actual food safety warning. “Best If Used By” indicates the date after which the product may not be at its best quality but is still safe to consume. “Use By” signifies the date after which the product’s safety may be compromised. For the first time in California, those two very different messages will be impossible to mix up.
The law also prohibits any person from selling or offering for sale in California a food item manufactured on or after July 1, 2026, that is labeled with the phrase “sell by,” though this does not extend to “sell by” dates presented in a coded format not easily readable by consumers – meaning retailers may continue using coded dates for internal stock rotation purposes. Stores can still manage their inventory. They just can’t put confusing language in front of shoppers while doing it.
Violations carry real consequences, including misdemeanor fines up to $1,000 per violation, licensing actions, and potential consumer litigation under California consumer protection statutes.
The Problem That Made This California Grocery Policy on Food Waste Necessary
To understand why California moved on this, it helps to understand how broken the previous system was. On grocery store shelves today, there are more than 50 differently phrased date labels on packaged food. “Enjoy by.” “Freshest before.” “Better if used by.” “Best before.” “Expires on.” According to the FDA, not one of these phrases is federally regulated for most products – except for infant formula, manufacturers are not required by federal law to place quality-based date labels on packaged food at all. Every phrase is essentially a manufacturer’s own invention, applied however they choose.
The result has been exactly what you’d expect. A 2025 nationally representative survey reported by CSPI found that consumer confusion around food date labeling led 88 percent of consumers to discard food near the package labeling date at least occasionally – and in 2023, Americans wasted over 3 billion pounds, approximately $7 billion worth of food, due to date label confusion alone.
Confusion over date labeling accounts for an estimated 20 percent of consumer food waste. That’s not a small rounding error in America’s food supply. That’s one-fifth of everything households throw out, driven not by food actually going bad, but by people misreading a stamp on the packaging.
Some phrases are used to communicate peak freshness of a product or when a product is no longer safe to eat. Others, like “sell by,” are used only to inform stock rotation in stores but mislead consumers into thinking the product is no longer safe to eat. The “sell by” date was never meant for the shopper at all. It was a back-office inventory tool that ended up on the front of the package, and tens of millions of people have been making food disposal decisions based on it ever since.
The cost of rising grocery prices makes this more urgent than ever. On average, each year consumers in the United States spend roughly $1,300 on food that is ultimately wasted. For a household already watching every dollar at the register, that number lands hard.
The Environmental Argument
The case for this California grocery policy on food waste isn’t only about household budgets. According to CalRecycle, landfilled food and other organic waste generates methane – a greenhouse gas that traps heat at 84 times the rate of carbon dioxide over the short term – and that waste stream currently accounts for about 20 percent of California’s total methane emissions. A significant portion of what fills those landfills is food.
Food that decomposes in an oxygen-free landfill environment doesn’t just disappear. It generates methane continuously, and Californians currently discard around five to six million tons of food waste annually, much of it due to misinterpretation of date labels.
AB 660 doesn’t solve California’s food waste problem on its own. But by making labels legible, it takes aim at one of the most fixable causes of waste at the household level, and it does so without requiring anyone to change their shopping habits, download an app, or remember a new set of rules.
Why This Is a First-in-the-Nation Moment
California’s AB 660 is the first mandatory state-level date labeling reform in the nation, and the law establishes a two-category system that will likely influence federal standards. The compliance implications extend beyond California’s borders in a very practical way.
Food manufacturers serving the national market face a choice: maintain California-specific packaging or reformulate all labels to meet California’s stricter standard. Given that California is the most populous state in the country and one of the largest consumer markets on earth, many manufacturers will simply update their labeling nationwide rather than run two separate packaging systems. This is sometimes called the “California effect” in food and product regulation – the state’s market size effectively sets national standards whether Congress acts or not.
AB 660’s labeling requirements do not apply to infant formula, eggs or pasteurized in-shell eggs, beer and other malt beverages, wine, spirits, or shellfish, to the extent that other laws require conflicting labeling terms. Those categories either carry their own federal rules or present distinct shelf-life dynamics that required separate treatment.
What Happens to Products Already on Shelves
This is where the law takes a pragmatic approach rather than a disruptive one. Because the labeling requirements apply only to food items “manufactured on or after July 1, 2026,” products manufactured before that date may continue to be sold with existing labels, effectively creating a sell-through period for pre-existing inventory. Retailers won’t be forced to pull compliant stock mid-shelf-life.
Companies should audit all current date labels and packaging of products for the California market to check for language that may be nonconforming, such as “sell by,” “expires on,” or “best before,” and update labels to reflect the mandatory standardized terms. For most food manufacturers, this is primarily a packaging update – changing what gets printed on a label – rather than a product reformulation.
Read More: Things You Should Never Store in Plastic Containers
The Bigger Picture
AB 660 is modest in scope and significant in implication at the same time. It doesn’t prevent food from spoiling. It doesn’t solve hunger. It doesn’t eliminate food waste. What it does is remove one specific, well-documented source of confusion that has been sending edible food to landfills for decades.
Standardizing date labels nationally would have a net financial benefit of $3.8 billion per year, the large majority of which would be savings to consumers – and that estimate comes before you factor in the environmental cost of the food that rots in landfills rather than feeding anyone.
Some of what drives the confusion isn’t dishonesty on the part of food makers. The labeling system evolved without any coherent design. Dates were added, phrases were coined, and consumers were left to piece together what it all meant. The yogurt in the back of the fridge with the “sell by” stamp two days past wasn’t necessarily unsafe. It was labeled in a way that made it feel that way.
California’s new rule is simple enough to explain in a sentence: “BEST If Used By” means quality. “USE By” means safety. Everything else is gone. If the idea catches on nationally, it may be one of the more straightforwardly useful policy changes an American consumer will see in the grocery store in years.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.