Supermarket giant Morrisons may have caused a stir when it replaced the use by date on its bottles of milk with a best before date, but its move last year triggered the start of a shift on selected products from other retailers.
Sainsbury's, Tesco, Aldi and the Co-op are among the grocery chains scrapping use-by dates or dairy products and best-before dates on some fruit and veg lines, in a bid to reduce the 26,082 tonnes of food which is thought to be wasted in the UK every day.
While customers were outraged at being told by Morrisons to try 'a sniff test' to make sure the milk was still fresh before they used it, Tesco's announcement last month that it was switching to best-before dates on more than 30 yoghurt products was partly in response to figures by environmental charity Wrap, which found that 54,000 tonnes of yoghurt are wasted each year. Half of the yoghurts thrown away are unopened because they had gone 'out-of-date'.
