I bought frozen BBQ eel and the best before date says LJ349. What does this mean?
J3 is the 3rd month that starts with J so it's July. 49 is the 49th day of July so August 18th. easy peasy
This is the most sound flogic I have ever witness, I shall now bow down to the Grand Nagus of flogic as I am not worthy to stand with thee
It might be the Julian date (I have no idea where the name comes from) which is just basically January 1st is 001, December 31st is 365, and the rest of the year is between. So this would be around December 15th.
We used it for food expirations on some things at the convenience store I used to work at.
The name comes from the name of the person who first proposed the Julian Calendar, Julius Caesar.
He was a buay man with all the salad and calendar making and had no time to just wait around for a kid to come out whenever they felt like it.
Seems useful if you’re trained to read these, but it seems like a kinda shitty system to be slapping on stuff for sale to the general public.
I suspect they did it so people wouldn't be put off from buying something close to expiration.
In fairness to the people I worked for, they only put it on stuff with a short shelf life anyway, so it was all fairly close to expiring. Also, it was a convenience store. Most people ate it right away.
Former grocery manager here. There are companies that purposely sell these weird cryptic date formats. I would always need to go look for their certain code to figure out what it translates to. I can't remember why either other than it's not normal and we just dealt with it.
Because of the other writing on the package, I'm wondering if because its sold on the international market and dates would get very confusing and possibly harmful.
If you buy fresh tuna and the country of origin date code is MM/DD/YY while you're DD/MM/YY or YY/DD/MM or YY/MM/DD you could end up with year-old fish or worse. So yeah.
And no, it won't always be something easily detectable by look and smell like fish.
You can easily write out the month: April 1, 2024. And don't say "people might not speak English" or Chinese or whatever. You know what language to put it in because the rest of the package has writing on it too.
plenty of packaging sold in the us is not in English if your at the hmart or wherever. they just slap an English ingredients sticker on it.
They do that with glues at my job. The code supposed to be used for quality control. Like first letter plant it was manufactured in and the second the month and so on. I think it dumb. Never seen it on food before.
Some uk supermarkets have started dropping the use by date in favour of codes like this. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45786012 The article says it’s to reduce waste and that staff will have special training to know when to bin stuff. I imagine the training is in how to read the codes.
I assume the point is the "best before" dates are mostly useless. They're useful for the store, but for a customer usually you should tell by smelling and looking at it. We evolved with senses to tell us when food has gone bad. Those dates aren't part of it. So much food is wasted because people think those are magic and should be obayed like a law.
That's great unless you have an impaired sense of smell, like I had for the last 2 weeks following a COVID infection, or other people have permanently.
On the flip side, knowing the rough best before date helps people buy the freshest stuff, since I can't open the cream with a date that says jr402 I won't know if it should be good for a week or a month.
That's the point. People will choose to buy the "freshest" stuff, meaning it created a lot of waste. If you can't tell what freshest then it will prevent older stuff from needing to be thrown out. If it's being sold at the store, it's fine.
That's fine unless you are buying well in advance and need to know it will still be good by the event. It will also prevent a customer like myself from noticing an item still on the shelf is a week past the sell-by date and should have been removed. Sealed cartons and other packaging prevents us from actually seeing the food, so someone could get home and open it and find it spoilt, wasting their money. "If it's being sold at the store, it's fine" is a mighty optimistic view of commerce. Even at a very well -run store I've found several packages of sliced Jarlsberg with mold inside, well before the date. And I received one with worse mold from a different grocery delivery. That's a Jarlsberg problem. I check them carefully, the delivery shopper didn't. He assumed if it was being sold in the store it was fine.
Fresh produce has it here in there Netherlands as well. Or our supermarket has for the last few years, a letter specifies the day of the week (Monday = A) and then the week number.
Week number we printed on the sticker machines and stuck on the start of every isle just to make it easier.
I mean... Expiration dates are mostly a lie anyway. Just do the sniff test, probably fine.
But, on topic, I do appreciate the post since that's weird.
Expiration dates give a clear and easy way to know if something is definitely still good.
Only after the expiration date do you have the need to do the sniff
I've seen food expire before the date stated, so you should also take into account where you live and the regulatory entities that manage your food and stuff.
I'd say always do the sniff if you are worried.
Leave your beef out on the counter for a day and I assure you, the expiration date will be useless.
Expiration dates are 99/100 times a baseline for guessing if an item is safe to consume. If you’re not using your brain and actually checking, you’re gonna have a bad time.
You don't even have to leave it on the counter sometimes. I had a steak a bit ago in the freezer, thawed it, smell test, it had gone bad. Best guess is some point in the store or transit it got stored improperly and it was bad before it got to my freezer. Always check even if in the expiration date food poisoning is awful
Is milk an exception? Because the moo juice always smells a little off to me. I usually have to resort to the take a small swig and pray technique to tell.
pour some in a cup then smell it, sometimes it's just the dried part by the cap that smells
It's frozen, so it's edible as long as it stays that way. It's "good" until it's too freezer burnt though.
Hard to do a sniff test on an unopened item in the store. I know that's not this exact scenario, and best by dates are iffy at best, but I'd like to have some notion of how long the product I'm about to buy has been around.
At the homebrewing store I used to frequent, I always picked through the cooler for the youngest yeast. Then they moved the cooler behind the cash registers and they clerks would just grab the one in the front. Then stupid Northern Brewer shut down all their retail stores.
Companies are allowed to do this in some nations as long as they also distribute the cipher to grocers. For example, literally every chewing tobacco I've seen. This leads to higher sales because lazy employees don't take the time to check the printout and remove expired product.
I have no reason to doubt what you're saying, but I really have to say this is the dumbest bullshit I've ever heard. The whole idea of putting expiration dates on products (and nutritional info for that matter) is for consumers to be able to interpret this stuff. Not manufacturers and not store managers. Consumers. There's no excuse for allowing this.
No arguments that it's shifty and dumb, but it's better if the store can be held liable for selling bad product. That said, almost anything with "best by" as opposed to "expired by" is still safe to eat for probably decades.
No, best before is for the market, it was never intended for customers, that's not the date the food goes bad, it's the date it starts to be different from their best, e.g. a bread might become harder than intended, so it's meant to have the store sell it on pristine condition. Use by date is the one that is for customers.
Well, that would be the reason if they were legally required to do so, but Baby Food is the only product in the US legally required to have an expiration date.
So, all the other food manufacturers voluntarily put expiration dates on, and they want you to buy more food, so the date on most packages is functionally meaningless
I don't know about today, but in the past New Jersey required that "expiration dates" be stamped on bottled water: https://nj1015.com/does-bottled-water-expire-nj-was-the-only-state-that-thought-so/
Even if similar markings are not required by law everywhere in the USA, food manufacturers are probably afraid of getting sued due to violating local laws, or even international laws if the food is transported across borders, so it's probably negligent to neglect printing them.
Like the other comment here says, no it wasn't. It's useful for the store to guarantee it's good, but customers should be ignoring them as using the senses we evolved to use to detect bad food. A store can't rely on this, partially for liability, partially for speed and consistency, but also largely because they can't open the packaging to smell it or look at it better.
If I as a buyer can't tell the difference between fresh and expired food before I buy it, then what's the store's incentive to not sell me something a few days or weeks after its sell-by date? Even if they want to, they can't keep track of every product on the shelves (I've encountered items past their date on shelves a number of times, sometimes significantly so) and they certainly don't check each item's date at checkout. If customers can't do the check as they shop, there's no way to protect against it. And just kick the shop, customers can't open the packaging before they buy.
I do realise based on your comment and others that I may have been wrong (probably country dependent), printed dates might be intended more for stock keepers than for consumers, but that doesn't mean it's okay to hide this information from buyers.
Did you know you can store smoked salmon at room temp pretty much indefinitely in an unopened package?
Food storage has gotten really good, all the tricks of smoke, sugar or salt of our ancestors with now radiation sterilization and other cool tricks with science.
All that to say. It's probably fine. You just bought it and I'm sure this was made to last as long as it can as reliably as it can so that they don't lose money.
Most best buy dates are just made up anyways and not based on much. Check for gas build up, a weird odor, extreme discoloration, or foreign objects or growths. That will get you through pretty much every rotten food type without having to taste it.
That's said, where are you shopping that has a mixture of Japanese, Chinese, French, and robot codes?
Oh shit, English and French required, arbitrary expiration date because it's not required.
You should be a detective I bet you nailed it in one.
Not sure about LJ... but 349 could simply refer to the day number. Day 349 this year is December 14th.
This is using the Julian calendar (standard calendar for most things)... maybe the J in LJ?
Live Journal user id 349
In order to determine the best before you'll need to solve the emo's riddle.
That looks like a failure to regulate and standardize expiration date format which ultimately benefits corporations and fucks the consumer.
I looked around the packaging for other clues as suggested by another Lemming but I didn't find anything. In fact I found the same thing printed on the front.
On a Chinese food package, "Best Before LJ349" typically refers to the expiration date, although the code "LJ349" doesn't follow a standard date format. In this context, "LJ349" is likely a batch code or internal reference used by the manufacturer. The manufacturer uses this code to track production specifics, such as the location or production line and date.
I thought it was helpful in the sense that there's likely no way to relate the date code.
I mean, you could have just said that instead of the unhelpful bullshit GPT apparently put out. Or just not commented at all if you didn’t actually have anything helpful to add.
Meh, I thought it was useful, maybe next time I should attribute GPT. No need to get bent up over it. It did attempt to give extra information that wasn't in the thread at the time.
It's Japanese not Mandarin too. I see うなぎ - unagi, which is definitely Hiragana
Edit: Now that I think about it though, Unagi is written in katakana I think? ウナギ, so maybe it is Chinese and they just poorly tried to translate
It's not a loan word so it's written in Hiragana.
That said, OP's screenshot has some culinary instructions written in Traditional Cantonese (so probably Macau), so I think it's Chinese.
Ah, fair! I only very recently started learning some Japanese, so beyond hiragana and katakana, I recognize basically nothing. I absolutely wouldn't be able to recognize the others as Cantonese!
Julian date format, Dec 14th (349th day of the year)
The LJ prefix is some manufacturer code, not relevant to exp date
OP! Can you please let us know:
Thanks!!
I bought it today and I'm not planning to eat it for a few days. I can only hope/assume it's still good.
Maybe it’s “Lichtjahr”? So as long as you stay within 3*10^15km of earth you should be fine 👍
Looks like a Julian date. 349 would reference the 349th day of the year. So assuming this year 2024, it would be best by December 14. Normally it would have the year at the end of the 3 digits (3494) for BB Dec 14 2024. Best guess I have. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
