Every dated product in your warehouse carries one of a handful of labels — use by, best before, EXP, sell by — and they do not mean the same thing. One is a safety cutoff you must never ship past; another is a quality suggestion that may legally survive its own date. Confusing them costs sellers in both directions: destroyed stock that was fine to sell, and shipped stock that never should have left the building. Here is what each date type means, how the UK and US differ, and how to encode them in your batch records so the rules enforce themselves.
The four date types at a glance
| Date type | What it means | Ship after the date? | Typically found on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Use by | Safety date. The product may be unsafe after this date even if it looks and smells fine. | No. Do not sell or ship after this date. | Chilled and perishable foods (dairy, meat, prepared meals) |
| Best before / Best if used by | Quality date. Flavor, texture, or potency may decline after it, but the product is not automatically unsafe. | Often legal with disclosure, depending on jurisdiction. Check your local rules. | Shelf-stable foods, snacks, beverages, dry goods |
| Expiry / EXP | The date through which the manufacturer stands behind labeled potency or performance. | No, as a practical rule for sellers. | Supplements, vitamins, medicines, cosmetics |
| Sell by | A stock-rotation instruction aimed at retailers, not a message to consumers. | It is a retail rotation cue; treat your own FEFO buffer as the real cutoff. | US grocery items, bakery, dairy |
Use by: the hard line
A use-by date is a safety date. It appears on products where deterioration can make food unsafe without any visible or smellable warning. For a seller, the operational rule is absolute: no unit ships on or after its use-by date, and realistically no unit should ship so close to the date that it arrives with nothing left. This is the date type where a FEFO buffer (covered below) matters most.
Best before: the quality line, and the gray zone
A best-before date is a quality date. The manufacturer is saying the product is at its best until then, not that it becomes hazardous afterward. So can you sell past a best before date? In many jurisdictions the answer is yes for shelf-stable goods, provided the product is still fit for purpose and the buyer is clearly told — think discounted short-dated or past-date listings with the date disclosed up front. But the rules differ by country, by product category, and by marketplace policy (Amazon, for example, sets its own expiry-window requirements independent of the law). Treat that as a question for your local food authority and your channel’s terms, not as settled fact from a blog post. What is universally true: silently shipping past-date stock at full price is a refund machine and a review disaster, whatever the legal position.
EXP on supplements and meds, and the sell-by red herring
Supplements and medicines carry an EXP date, which marks the end of the period the manufacturer guarantees labeled potency. A vitamin past EXP is usually a degraded product rather than a dangerous one, but for a seller the distinction is academic: shipping past-EXP supplements invites marketplace suspensions and regulatory attention, so treat EXP like a use-by date operationally. Sell-by dates are the opposite trap: they are internal rotation cues for retailers, not consumer deadlines, and panicking about them wastes stock. Your own first-expired-first-out discipline, applied against the real quality or safety date, supersedes the sell-by label.
UK versus US: same shelf, different vocabulary
If you sell on both sides of the Atlantic, the terminology and the formats both shift. The UK uses a fairly tidy two-term system, use by (safety) and best before (quality), with dates written day-first. The US has no single federal standard for most foods, so labels vary: Best if Used By, Use By, Sell By, and Freeze By all appear, with dates written month-first. That format difference is not cosmetic: 04/09/2026 is April 9 in Ohio and September 4 in Oxford, and a mis-parsed date silently corrupts every downstream expiry calculation. Whatever system holds your batch records needs to support both UK and US date formats explicitly, the way TraceLot does, rather than guessing.
Encoding date types in your batch records
The label on the carton is marketing surface; your batch record is where the logic lives. When a lot arrives, capture the date and the date type against the lot number, because the type determines how the date is enforced.
- Record the printed date and its type (use by, best before, EXP, sell by) on every received lot — a custom batch field works well for the type.
- Set a shipping buffer per type: a common pattern is to stop allocating a lot 30 to 60 days before its date, so the customer receives usable shelf life rather than a countdown.
- Use tighter buffers for safety dates and longer ones for slow-consumption products — a 90-serving supplement tub needs more remaining life than a snack bar.
- Let FEFO allocation do the enforcement: with dates on lots, the earliest-expiring eligible lot is assigned to each order automatically as it syncs from Veeqo or Shopify.
- Put the lot and expiry on pick lists and packing slips so the picker physically pulls the lot the system allocated.
THE BUFFER IS THE POLICY
A date on a label protects nobody by itself. The decision that protects customers is the buffer: how many days before the printed date you stop shipping. Write the buffer down per product category, encode it in your allocation rules, and audit it in your rotation SOP.
See short-dated stock coming before it becomes a write-off
TraceLot forecasts expiry risk at 10, 30, 60, and 90-day horizons from your real sales velocity, so you can discount, bundle, or redirect short-dated lots while they are still sellable.
Explore expiry-risk forecastsTurning dates into daily discipline
Once every lot carries a typed date and a buffer, the rest is rotation: receive to the back, pick from the front, and reconcile what the system says against what the shelf holds. Our warehouse FEFO rotation SOP turns that into a written procedure your team can run without you. The payoff is symmetrical: fewer complaints about short-dated deliveries, and fewer pallets of perfectly sellable best-before stock going in the bin.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between best before and use by?
Use by is a safety date: the product may be unsafe after it, so it must not be sold or shipped past that date. Best before is a quality date: flavor or texture may decline afterward, but the product is not automatically unsafe once the date passes.
Can you sell products past their best before date?
Often yes for shelf-stable goods, provided the product is still fit for consumption and the date is clearly disclosed to the buyer — but the rules vary by country, product category, and marketplace policy, so check your local food authority’s guidance and your sales channel’s terms before listing past-date stock.
What does the EXP date on supplements mean?
EXP marks the end of the period the manufacturer guarantees the product delivers its labeled potency. Sellers should treat it as a hard shipping cutoff, since past-EXP supplements risk marketplace suspensions and customer complaints even when they are not dangerous.
How long before an expiry date should I stop shipping a product?
A common practice is a 30 to 60-day buffer before the printed date, so customers receive usable shelf life. Use longer buffers for products consumed slowly, such as multi-month supplement tubs, and enforce the buffer through FEFO allocation rather than manual checks.
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