Don’t mess with expiry dates - ever

31 March 2015 - 13:00 By Wendy Knowler
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Image: Supplied

It’s illegal for a supplier in the food chain to remove or alter a date mark, be it a best-before or a sell-by date, for obvious reasons. 

When a date mark on perishable foods such as meat are tampered with, it’s particularly alarming, given the health implications.

Martine Clarke emailed In Your Corner to report a case of a new best-before date being added to a pack which still displayed the original date mark.

On buying packs of sausage meat on March 10 at the Eskort factory shop in Estcourt, KZN, he was guided by the best-before date on the front of the pack March 14.

(Strictly speaking fresh meat ought to carry a use-by date, not a best-before date, indicating the date after which a product most definitely should not be consumed.)

But when Clarke’s wife came to prepare the meat, she noticed a smaller sticker on the back of the pack with another, earlier date mark - February 19.

“This led us to believe that they are selling old stock that has been returned to the factory in the factory shop - definitely not good business practice,” he told In Your Corner.

Responding, Eskort Limited’s CEO, Arnold Prinsloo said said the re-dating of the sausage meat was “totally unacceptable to Eskort”.

“The butchery manager is a new appointee and he believed that he was doing the correct thing when he froze the sausage meat, due to excess stock, in order to resell the product at a later stage.

“We do not condone this sort of behaviour, whatever the circumstances may be.”
By law, thawed meat which has been previously frozen must declare this fact on the labelling, to avoid consumers freezing and defrosting the meat again, which carries health risks.

Pay very close attention to date marks on food, especially meat products, as tampering and re-marking is unfortunately not uncommon.

Email: consumer@knowler.co.za

Twitter: @wendyknowler

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