sell by dates

[bigpaul]

Lidl and Waitrose skips are behind locked doors but I have seen places like Spar and Nisa with open access to skips, so it would seem the smaller ones are the ones to go for-err...if one was going to that is!!

[Geordie_Rob]

When I worked at morrisons in 2002-2004 on the fruit & veg bit, we reduced the stuff down to literally pennies. If it went past the display date, the package was taken off & detergent was poured into the rubbish bag with the food in to stop anyone trying to take it. Pretty pathetic on the supermarkets part I thought.

[bigpaul]

some supermarkets reduce it down to(sometimes literally) pennies at the end of the day, especially bread products, you just have to get to know what time of day they do this.

[Scythe13]

With eggs, when they're out of the chicken, as long as they don't get too warm from the sun (just keep them in the kitchen cupboard) they'll stay good for well over a month! Eggs are usually picked within 24 hours of being laid. Then they are shipped to the egg checking company that makes sure they're clean and uncracked (they use a cool machine that scans the shell and checks for cracks...pretty cool I think) then 'lion stamped' boxed up and shipped off. Put into a warehouse then out within a week. As BP says, they can be upto a month old from chicken to shelf. So picking my own...I'm happy to let them sit in the kitchen from Jan until early March, and still be happy they're good.

[Tarrel]

That's one thing that makes hens a good prepping measure. They tend to go off-lay in the depths of winter, but it doesn't matter, because the eggs they lay in the late autumn will last for weeks.

Food regulations are a mess. When we sell eggs at the door we are required by the Food Standards Agency to display a "best before" date of four weeks from lay, and to advise the buyer to "keep chilled". Actually, the method in which eggs go stale is loss of moisture from inside the egg through the semi-permeable membrane that is the shell. This loss of moisture will be increased if the eggs are kept in a low-humidity environment, which is eggsactly the condition in a fridge! Better to keep them at a cool room-temperature in moderately humid air.

I suppose the rules are there in case someone decides to keep them right next to a radiator or something.