Date labelling in kitchens: use-by, best-before, open life

By Zynthio. Published 10 September 2026, updated 12 September 2026. Editorial policy

General information for UK hospitality operators, not legal advice. If something here is wrong or out of date, the editorial policy explains how to report it.

Use-by and best-before mean different things in law, but date labelling on decanted or cooked food is set by your kitchen, not the supplier.

Date labelling on food that has been opened, decanted or cooked in your own kitchen is set by your team, not by the supplier, and the date written on the tub has to be shorter than any date already on the pack. Use-by and best-before arrive with the delivery, mean different things in law, and knowing which one is in front of you decides what happens when it passes.

Use-by is a safety date set by law

A use-by date goes on food that is highly perishable and therefore likely, after a short period, to constitute an immediate danger to human health. The rule sits in Article 24 of Regulation (EU) 1169/2011, kept in force here as assimilated law, and it is blunt: after the use-by date a food is deemed to be unsafe in accordance with Article 14 of Regulation (EC) 178/2002. Nothing in that test asks how the food looks, how it smells, or whether the chef would happily eat it, and it applies the same way to food served as it is and food used as an ingredient in something else.

Enforcement, by contrast, is national rather than UK-wide. In England the offence and enforcement provisions sit in the Food Safety and Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013, while Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each enforce through their own equivalent hygiene regulations, so an operator outside England should work from the instrument for their own nation rather than the England one. The use-by rule underneath is the same in all four nations, because it comes from the labelling regulation and not from any single nation's enforcement instrument. Staff who have never had that explained often treat a use-by date as guidance like any other, and that assumption is where the real risk sits, rather than in the labelling machine or a printer ribbon running low.

Best-before is a quality date, not a free pass

A best-before date relates to quality rather than safety, and it appears on dried goods, tinned products, frozen lines and most ambient stock. Government guidance on best before and use-by dates puts the distinction plainly: use-by dates relate to the safety of food, whereas best before dates relate to quality. Selling food after its best-before date is therefore not in itself an offence, but the food still has to be safe and must not be described in a misleading way. Most kitchens treat a passed best-before as a prompt to check rather than an instruction to bin, which is reasonable provided someone genuinely makes that decision and records it. A store cupboard of unreviewed best-before stock is a different problem from a chiller holding an expired use-by item, even though both look, at a glance, like the same kind of untidiness.

Date labelling once you open, decant or cook

Open a vacuum pack, decant a sauce into a smaller tub, cook a batch for the fridge or portion a chilled product, and the supplier's date stops applying. From that point the shelf life is yours to set, it has to be shorter than the original, and it has to be applied the same way across the site. No regulation prints a number for it. Day dots and open-life rules are business practice, which means they are decisions your food safety management system, built on HACCP principles, has to make, justify and then hold to. The Food Standards Agency's Safer Food, Better Business pack is the usual framework for writing those procedures down, and it applies in England and Wales, with Safe Catering used in Northern Ireland and CookSafe in Scotland.

A HACCP plan an EHO will respect should set out how secondary shelf life is decided for each category of decanted or cooked food, rather than leaving it to whoever is on shift to guess. A digital food safety checklist that timestamps every entry against a name gives a kitchen a way to hold that standard, because the record cannot be filled in three weeks later; applying the labelling rule itself still rests with the team rather than the software. Sauces, stocks and marinades made in batch and cooled for later use are where this slips most often, because cooking feels like it resets the clock when in fact it starts a new and shorter one that needs labelling and tracking in its own right.

Freezing and the use-by clock

Freezing food before its use-by date is permitted and effectively stops that date, provided the item is labelled with what it is and the date it went in. The same guidance on cooked, frozen and defrosted food sets two figures worth writing into your own procedures: food cooked before its use-by date should be cooled, kept in the fridge and eaten within 48 hours or frozen for later, and food that has been defrosted should be used within 24 hours. Those are the origin of the two-day habit most kitchens work to, although in a business the figure you adopt is one your own procedures have to justify rather than one you borrow without thinking. None of it works unless the freezing date is recorded at the point of freezing, instead of being reconstructed from memory when someone finds an unmarked tub at the back. Where freezing is used routinely to catch stock nearing its date, fix a point in the shift, such as the end-of-day fridge check, when anything close gets frozen and labelled.

Labelling practice that survives an inspection

The routine that keeps this defensible is straightforward, and most of it comes down to timing and consistency rather than anything technical.

• Label at the moment of opening or decanting, not at the end of the shift when the details have been forgotten.
• Write both dates on the container: when it was opened or made, and when it must be used by.
• Use one labelling system across the whole site, so an agency chef or a new starter can read it without being told how it works.
• Never top up a container without emptying and cleaning it first, because a topped-up tub carries the oldest food under the newest date.
• Check dates on the daily fridge and freezer round, not only when deliveries arrive.

None of that needs new equipment. It needs one rule the whole kitchen works to, written where a new starter can read it, and a manager who notices on the day that an unlabelled container has appeared rather than a fortnight later when the tub is already at the back of the chiller.

Where inspectors actually mark you down

Officers rarely find a kitchen with no labels at all. What they find is inconsistency: handwritten labels on some containers and none on others, ambiguous date formats that mean different things to different staff, a chiller full of unlabelled tubs on a Sunday because the person who normally handles it was off, or a written two-day rule that the fridge plainly contradicts on the day of the visit. A documented procedure your practice does not match is worse than having no procedure at all, because it shows you knew the standard and did not meet it. Keeping a clear, consistent record of dates and checks is one part of the wider paper trail set out in due diligence and food safety records, and it works best alongside solid allergen labelling, since a wrong shelf life and a missing allergen note tend to surface in the same conversation with an officer, as allergen management under Natasha's Law sets out.

Next step

See how a food safety checklist that timestamps every entry against a name, raises a corrective action automatically when a temperature reading comes back out of range, and turns weeks of records into a PDF compares with a paper pack, on the food safety software solution page.

See how Zynthio handles this