Ensuring your shopping basket is filled with a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables is key to maintaining a nutritious, balanced diet.
These items are perfect for snacking or adding to meals, but the freshness of produce can vary depending on where you purchase them, often spoiling quickly.
In an effort to combat food waste, many supermarkets have done away with ‘best-before’ dates on their products, encouraging customers to use their judgement instead.
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However, it can still be challenging to tell which fruits and vegetables will stay fresh throughout the week. According to consumer experts at Which?, there’s a secret method to determine this – hidden codes that supermarkets would rather you didn’t know about.
The experts shared a brief video on Instagram, explaining what to look out for on supermarket labels to ensure you’re selecting the freshest produce available.
With many supermarkets no longer printing use-by dates on fruit and vegetable packaging, shoppers at Asda and Tesco should instead look for a ‘letter and number’. These stores use letters A-L to represent each month of the year, with the number indicating the day.
For example, if a bag of potatoes is marked with B27, this indicates a best before date of February 27.
The process is slightly more complex when shopping at Sainsbury’s.
The expert said: “Their codes start and end with J and S, which stands for J Sainsbury PLC, the official name of the company. But in between, there’s some numbers representing the date and month.”
Taking 2702 as an example, this would indicate a use-by date of February 27th. Following a similar concept, Marks and Spencer encloses the date and month within a 1J and C1 on their labels.
Aldi’s system is a bit more complex, with four digits on the label – the week of the year as the first two numbers, and the day of the week as the last two.
Experts suggest that by comparing the labels on two identical items, you can decide which one has a longer shelf life by the higher set of numbers.
Meanwhile, Morrisons keeps it simple for customers by printing the first letter of the month followed by the date on their products.