New study demonstrates how much food is wasted because of date labels

Want to save money on grocery costs?

Pay less attention to those dates you find on packaged foods.

A new Canadian study demonstrates just how much food we throw out because we are putting way too much stock in date labels.

The survey was commissioned by Too Good To Go, an app-based company that sells surplus food. It was conducted by Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab earlier this year.

“On a yearly basis, an average Canadian household discards $761 worth of food because it reached the date. And out of all this money, $246 is linked to best-before-date confusion,” says the company’s Nicolas Dot.

The release of the results is part of a wider campaign to highlight how much food is wasted in Canada and how much of that can be traced back to myths and misconceptions about date