The American Public Wants Standardized Food Date Labels, FLPC Review Finds

By Akif Khan, Clinical Fellow

As many of us across the country buy food, prepare meals, and serve loved ones this Thanksgiving, it is important to remember that the abundance of the holidays can also lead to massive levels of food waste. A recent ReFED estimate found that 320 million pounds of food will be thrown away this Thanksgiving. That’s $550 million of food wasted in a single day. Reducing food waste this Thanksgiving, and all year round, is not just environmentally conscious but also financially savvy.  

An easy way to reduce food waste is to make sure we do not throw food away unless it is no longer edible. Many people across the country trust food date labels to indicate when food is no longer safe to consume, but unfortunately, most food date labels in the U.S. do not actually indicate food safety. Rather, food date labels generally indicate either when food products are at their peak quality or when a manufacturer recommends consuming a food product. This mismatch often misleads many people into tossing food prematurely, wasting food, money, and resources. 

To understand this issue more clearly, USDA-FSIS and FDA jointly published a Request for Information (RFI) on Food Date Labeling last December. In this RFI, the agencies sought input on industry practices and preferences for date labels on food products, research on consumer perceptions of food date labels, and the impacts of food date labels on food waste. 

The submission period for the RFI closed on March 5, 2025, and the agencies received almost 7,000 public comments from individuals, businesses, trade associations, food recovery organizations, research groups, universities, and state- and local-government bodies. The Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC), alongside many other stakeholders, submitted a comment letter to provide insights, share research, and suggest solutions. 

FLPC has also reviewed 100 public comment submissions, including all comments submitted by organizations and a sampling of comments submitted by individuals, in order to identify any trends amongst the publicly available comments. Through this analysis, FLPC has identified a set of shared concerns amongst all types of stakeholders, which are that current food date labeling practices in the United States cause: 

• Supply Chain Inefficiencies and Confusion: The patchwork of state-level food date labeling laws in the United States is a point of constant difficulty for manufacturers, food recovery organizations, and consumers. 

• Increased Food Waste and Health Risks: Food date labels do not currently have any standardized meanings, so food date labels do not clearly indicate anything about food products’ quality or safety. Therefore, consumers who are overly cautious are tossing safe food prematurely based on the date label, while others are ignoring date labels and consuming food past discard date—even for food products that may be risky past the date. 

• Financial Losses: Stakeholders who toss food based solely on the date label, from families to retailers, suffer heavy financial losses each year. Food recovery organizations also spend precious funding toward training staff, educating donors, and raising awareness on the proper handling of past-date food products. 

Alongside these key identified issues, many commenters called for changes to food date labeling in the United States. Specifically, comments across all stakeholder types identified federal date label standardization as the best solution to the issues caused by the current patchwork system. Across the comments we reviewed, commenters generally agreed that date label standardization at the federal level, coupled with education, could: 

• Save money for actors across the supply chain and for households; 

• Increase the availability of and access to safe, edible food; 

• Mitigate environmental harms and resource strains caused by food waste; 

• Align with international recommendations & industry initiatives; and 

• Build upon state-level progress on date label standardization. 

To learn more about trends in public comments on food date labeling, and to see key quotes on this issue from all types of stakeholders, check out the full FLPC review here.