FSANZ Date Marking: Choosing Between Use By, Best Before, and Baked On

Selecting the wrong date statement is one of the more consequential labelling errors a food business can make. It looks like a labelling decision, but it is really a food safety decision dressed up as one. Use By creates a legal prohibition on sale past the date. Best Before does not. Apply Use By to a shelf-stable product and you cut its saleable life off at the cliff edge. Apply Best Before to a high-risk perishable and you have removed the legal mechanism that protects consumers from eating it after it is no longer safe.

This guide covers what's required under Standard 1.2.5 of the FSANZ Food Standards Code, how to decide which statement applies, and the practical steps for keeping your date marking defensible.

Who Does This Apply To?

If you're responsible for placing a packaged food product on the Australian or New Zealand market (regardless of where it was made), date marking requirements apply to you. This includes:

Manufacturers producing food domestically
Importers bringing food into Australia or New Zealand for retail sale
Co-packers and contract manufacturers producing food on behalf of a brand owner
Retailers selling products under a private label
Brand owners whose name appears on the label, even if they don't produce the food themselves

Selecting the date statement is not an aesthetic choice. It is a regulated declaration backed by your shelf-life testing, and the legal responsibility for it sits with the business whose name and address appears on the label as the supplier.

The Three Date Statements Recognised by FSANZ

Standard 1.2.5 recognises three forms of date marking. Most products will use one of the first two. The third is narrow and product-specific.

Use By

Used for foods where safety (not just quality) is a concern after the date. Use By is the appropriate statement for short-shelf-life, high-risk perishables, including:

Fresh meat, poultry, seafood
Ready-to-eat dairy products (fresh cheese, cream, custard)
Smoked or cured fish products
Prepared salads, sandwiches, sushi, and other ready-to-eat chilled meals
Soft and semi-soft cheeses

The label displays: Use by: DD/MM/YY

Important: Displaying a Use By date creates a legal obligation. It is an offence under Australian food law to sell a food after its Use By date. Use By must be selected when genuinely required for food safety reasons — and it must not be selected as a precaution on products that are not actually safety-critical, because doing so destroys saleable shelf life with no compliance benefit.

Best Before

Used for foods that remain safe to eat after the date but may lose quality (texture, flavour, colour, nutritional value). Best Before is appropriate for the majority of shelf-stable packaged foods, including biscuits, cereals, sauces, snack foods, dry pasta, confectionery, and similar products.

The label displays: Best before: DD/MM/YY

Baked On / Baked For

A narrow exception that applies only to bread with a shelf life of less than 7 days. Instead of a Use By or Best Before statement, the label may carry a Baked on: DD/MM/YY or Baked for: DD/MM/YY statement.

This is the only category in which a manufacture-date-style statement is permitted under Standard 1.2.5. It does not extend to other short-shelf-life baked goods, and it does not apply to bread with a shelf life of 7 days or more (which must use Best Before).

How to Decide Which Applies

The deciding question is straightforward in principle:

Is the food likely to become unsafe — not just lower quality — after the date?

If yes, Use By. If no, Best Before. The answer is not a matter of opinion. It comes from your shelf-life testing and the food safety risk assessment for the product. Relevant factors include:

Microbiological profile — pH, water activity, salt content, presence of preservatives
Ready-to-eat status — is the food consumed without a further kill step?
Refrigeration dependency — does safety rely on a maintained cold chain?
Process controls — pasteurisation, retort, acidification, hot fill
Pack format — modified atmosphere, vacuum, ambient

If your shelf-life data shows that pathogen growth or toxin formation is the limiting factor for the stated shelf life, the date statement should be Use By. If your shelf-life data shows that quality (rancidity, staling, oxidation, colour fade) is the limiting factor — and microbiological safety is comfortably maintained beyond the stated date — the date statement should be Best Before.

Note: Selecting the date statement without underlying shelf-life data is not a defensible position. If you do not have shelf-life testing on file for the product, the date itself is unsupported regardless of which words sit in front of it.

Format and Wording Requirements

Standard 1.2.5 prescribes the wording. The label must use one of:

Use by [date]
Best before [date]
Baked on [date] or Baked for [date] (bread with shelf life under 7 days only)

Variations such as Expiry, Exp, BBE, BB, or Sell by are not compliant on their own in the Australian and New Zealand market. Where these appear on overseas-sourced packaging, they must be corrected before retail sale.

The date itself follows day/month/year sequence. Where the shelf life is more than three months, the day may be omitted and the date expressed as month and year (e.g. Best before: MAR 2027). Where the shelf life is shorter than three months, the full day/month/year format is required.

The date statement must be legible, prominent, and not removable through normal handling. It must appear on a panel that will not be obscured by other labelling, price stickers, or shelf placement.

Storage Conditions: The Other Half of the Date Statement

A date statement is only valid in the context of the storage conditions that support it. If your shelf-life testing assumed refrigeration at 4 °C or below, the label must say so. If it assumed an unopened pack, the label must say so. If it assumed a particular storage orientation or protection from light, the label must say so.

A Use By date on a chilled product without a refrigeration instruction is not a complete date statement. The same applies to a Best Before date that depends on cool, dry storage to be valid.

Practical tip: Treat the date statement and the storage instruction as a single declaration. Reviewing one without the other invites the kind of inconsistency that surfaces during a recall investigation.

Exempt Foods

Standard 1.2.5 exempts a small set of foods from date marking. The most commonly relied-upon exemption is for foods with a best before date of 2 years or more, which covers many canned and ambient-stable products where it is genuinely difficult to nominate a meaningful date.

Other exemptions cover small-format and immediate-consumption products such as individual portions of ice cream and single-serve foods prepared for immediate consumption.

If your product is exempt, no date statement is required — but the lot identification requirement under Standard 1.2.2 still applies. Exemption from date marking is not exemption from traceability.

Common Errors and How to Avoid Them

A handful of mistakes account for most of the date marking issues that surface in audits and recalls:

Defaulting to Best Before on a perishable product to avoid the legal exposure of Use By. This is a compliance failure in the opposite direction — it is the suppression of a required safety statement.
Defaulting to Use By on a shelf-stable product as a precaution. This is not a safety win. It removes legal saleable life and forces avoidable disposal.
Inconsistent date statement and storage instructions — a chilled date with no refrigeration callout, or an ambient date with a Keep refrigerated instruction.
Date statement printed in a position that gets obscured by a price sticker, by shrink-wrap overlap, or by the orientation of the product on shelf.
Overseas wording left in place on imported product (BBE, EXP, MFG) without local re-marking.

For Importers Specifically

Imported product is the most common source of non-compliant date marking on the Australian and New Zealand market. Two issues recur:

Wording — overseas equivalents (BBE, EXP, Sell by, Mfg) are not compliant on their own under Standard 1.2.5. The local label must use Use by, Best before, or the bread-specific Baked on / Baked for.
Date format — US-style MM/DD/YY dates are routinely misread as DD/MM/YY by Australian and New Zealand consumers. A 03/04/26 printed in the US means 4 March; an Australian consumer will read it as 3 April. The format must be corrected for the local market, and the safest convention is to write the month in letters (e.g. 4 MAR 26).

A sticker override is acceptable provided it fully covers the non-compliant text, is not removable, and meets all other label legibility requirements. Where the original date and the override conflict, the override governs — but the conflict itself invites confusion at point of sale and during inspection.

Checklist for Food Businesses

Use this as a practical review when auditing your labels:

Checklist item: The date statement type (Use By, Best Before, or Baked On/For) is supported by shelf-life testing on file
Checklist item: Use By is applied to safety-critical perishables, not as a precaution on shelf-stable products
Checklist item: Best Before is applied to quality-limited shelf-stable products, not as a default on perishables
Checklist item: Baked On / Baked For is used only on bread with a shelf life under 7 days
Checklist item: The date wording uses the prescribed FSANZ form (no EXP, BBE, or Sell by on its own)
Checklist item: The date format is unambiguous in the Australian / New Zealand market
Checklist item: Storage conditions on the label are consistent with the assumptions behind the shelf life
Checklist item: A lot identification is present and remains legible through to point of sale
Checklist item: The date code is positioned on a panel that won't be obscured
Checklist item: For exempt products: lot identification is still applied, even though the date is not required
Checklist item: For imported products: any non-compliant overseas wording or date format has been corrected for the local market

A Note on Shelf Life Validation

The date statement is only as good as the shelf-life data behind it. Reformulations, supplier changes, packaging changes, and process changes all have the potential to shift the limiting factor for shelf life — sometimes from a quality limit to a safety limit, which can change the appropriate date statement entirely. Building a process for periodic shelf-life re-validation, and linking it to your change management procedure, is the most reliable way to keep your date marking defensible over time.

If you're using Ingredible, the date marking type and lot/batch code format are captured against each product and rendered on the label brief, so the choice is recorded against the product record rather than left to the judgement of whoever is laying out the artwork.