California became the first state in the nation to dictate the exact wording food manufacturers must stamp on their packaging, as a new law banning "sell by" labels took effect on July 1. The mandate requires companies selling food in the state to replace familiar date labels with one of two government-approved phrases: "Best if Used By" for peak quality, or "Use By" for product safety.
The stated goal is reducing food waste. The method is pure Sacramento: a top-down mandate on private industry, authored by a Democratic assemblymember, with no publicly disclosed enforcement mechanism and no clear cost accounting for the businesses forced to comply.
Democratic Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin authored the bill, which California approved in 2024. Irwin's office offered no direct public comment in the reporting surrounding the law's rollout. The bill was co-sponsored by Californians Against Waste, an advocacy group, and has drawn support from the California Grocers Association, though some of that association's own member grocers had to overhaul their labeling systems to comply.
Supporters of the law point to genuine consumer confusion. A 2022 University of Maryland report found more than 50 different date labels on packaged food sold in American stores. The information on those labels, the report noted, "is largely unregulated and often does not relate to food safety." The Food and Drug Administration has attributed nearly 20 percent of the nation's food waste to date-label confusion alone.
In California, advocates say approximately 6 million tons of unexpired food gets tossed each year because shoppers misread labels as safety warnings when they are actually quality suggestions. Nick Lapis, director of advocacy at Californians Against Waste, framed the fix as simple and inexpensive:
"We don't need to build some kind of huge infrastructure and invest tons of money to solve this. We just need companies to use the same words across brands."
Kumar Chandran, policy director at the nonprofit ReFED, described the consumer behavior the law targets:
"Consumers get confused and they just default to assuming that whatever date is on the package means 'don't eat it and throw it away.'"
Fair enough. Nobody wants good food thrown out over a misunderstood sticker. But the question worth asking is whether a state-level mandate on label wording, imposed on every manufacturer that wants access to the largest consumer market in the country, is the right tool, or just the most available one for a legislature that rarely sees a problem it doesn't want to regulate.
The law bans "sell by" dates on food packaging sold in California. Manufacturers must choose "Best if Used By," "Use By," or both. The logic is that "sell by" was always a retailer inventory tool, not a consumer safety guide, and its presence on packaging led millions of shoppers to treat it as an expiration date.
That much is reasonable on its face. The USDA recommended roughly a decade ago that food sellers switch to "Best if Used By" labeling. Many large manufacturers had already moved in that direction voluntarily.
But the law raises questions it does not answer. No bill number or statute text has been publicly cited in the reporting. No penalties or enforcement mechanisms for noncompliant manufacturers have been disclosed. Whether exemptions exist for certain food categories remains unclear. And the cost to grocers who had to overhaul their labeling systems? Also undisclosed.
Nate Rose, a spokesperson for the California Grocers Association, called the change positive but acknowledged the transition is messy. He described it as:
"A win-win where we can reduce food waste and consumers will find these decisions a little bit simpler."
Rose also noted that shoppers will still find old labels in stores for months as grocers sell through existing inventory. So on day one of the new mandate, the old labels remain on shelves, a fitting metaphor for a law that promises clarity but delivers a long transition period of mixed signals.
Here is a detail that deserves more attention than it typically gets: the only food product in America with a federally regulated date label is infant formula. Everything else, every carton of milk, every package of ground beef, every can of soup, carries date labels that are effectively voluntary and unstandardized at the federal level.
That gap is real. A bipartisan bill to establish uniform national food labels is currently pending in Congress. If it passes, California's law becomes redundant. If it doesn't, California's mandate becomes the de facto national standard, because manufacturers who want to sell in the state's $3-trillion-plus economy will simply adopt the California labels everywhere rather than run two labeling lines.
This is the California regulatory playbook. The state passes a rule. The rule's market gravity pulls the rest of the country along. Whether that outcome is good policy or regulatory imperialism depends on where you sit, but it is worth being honest about what is happening. Sacramento is not just regulating California. It is shaping national commerce through the back door.
New York's state legislature recently approved a similar food labeling law, which awaits Governor Kathy Hochul's signature. Legislation has been proposed in Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and South Carolina, but none of those efforts has passed.
Chandran, the ReFED policy director, said the California and New York actions have added momentum to the push for a national standard. That may be true. But momentum toward federal action and actual federal action are two different things, and in the meantime, manufacturers face a patchwork of state mandates, exactly the kind of regulatory fragmentation that makes compliance expensive and unpredictable for businesses.
One of the strongest arguments for label reform comes from food banks. Lapis noted that "sell by" dates have been a persistent problem for food bank operations because donors and recipients alike treat those dates as meaning the food has expired, when in many cases the product is perfectly safe to eat.
Kimberley Kausen, a chef and cooking teacher in Irvine, California, offered a more practical consumer perspective:
"I'll put some thought into it, and if we're talking about meat and poultry, I'm very cautious about that and for sure will do the smell test and the touch test."
Kausen's common-sense approach, use your eyes, your nose, and your judgment, is exactly how most Americans already handle food at home. The question is whether a government mandate on label wording will change behavior more effectively than consumer education would, and at what cost to the businesses forced to comply.
The underlying problem is real. Confusing food labels waste food and money. The FDA's own numbers back that up. But California's approach, mandating specific phrases, banning others, and leaving enforcement details, cost impacts, and exemption questions unanswered in public reporting, follows a familiar pattern. Identify a genuine issue. Reach for a mandate. Skip the cost-benefit math. Declare victory.
The USDA asked industry to adopt clearer labels voluntarily a decade ago. Many companies did. The ones that didn't could have been pressured through market forces, retailer requirements, or federal action. Instead, Sacramento stepped in with a law that treats every food manufacturer in America as a subject of California's regulatory authority, so long as they want to sell a single can of beans west of the Sierra Nevada.
When one state can dictate the label on your cereal box from three thousand miles away, the issue is no longer just food waste. It's who gets to write the rules for American commerce, and whether anyone bothered to ask the people paying the compliance costs.
