THUNDER BAY — Eliminating best-before dates on many grocery items makes good sense to the executive director of the Northwestern Ontario Regional Food Distribution Association.
Volker Kromm believes a lot of perfectly good food gets tossed out because people wrongly believe the best-before date is equivalent to an expiry date.
He was responding Wednesday to last week's recommendation from the House of Commons agriculture committee that the federal and provincial governments investigate the impact of doing away with best-before dates.
"I'm quite excited by the suggestion because I think it will put a spotlight on that entire issue," Kromm said. "There's a lot of confusion and a lot of misconceptions about what that is."
He said dropping best-before dates should cause a lot less food to be wasted in the landfill.
"Because people receiving it view that as the expiry date, and that is just cautionary. Generally, most food will last for a very long time, the canned or the non-perishable foods, much past the best-before date based on conversations with the manufacturers."
Kromm emphasized that there's still a need to keep essential safeguards in place.
"I think this is a good move. I'm not saying it should be a blanket suggestion that there's no place for best-before dates. But at least it would help, in the short term, to provide us with more food," he said.
If the government were to revise the regulations, he expects the RFDA would be able to distribute more food to its clients in Thunder Bay and across Northwestern Ontario.
"The food that comes in would be more acceptable to anyone who receives our hampers. Sometimes we get food that is very close to the best-before date, and it's very difficult to ship that out, knowing that our clients would not look favourably on receiving the food, when there's nothing wrong with it. If we put a little more emphasis on understanding expiry dates, that would probably help as well. So the best-before dates could be reviewed. But I think if we removed that, it would certainly be a boon to the food banking industry."
Other countries are also looking at the possible elimination of best-before dates, including the United Kingdom and Australia.
Earlier this year, Second Harvest Canada CEO Lori Nikkel noted that best-before dates only refer to a product's peak freshness, but are mistakenly confused with expiry dates.
She said doing away with them would ultimately save Canadians money on their grocery bills.
But Nikkel also stated that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency would have to be involved "to make sure that we're not ever making any food unsafe."
