Examining the trade-offs in potential retail benefits of different expiration date modes: Insights into multidimensional scenarios

A significant challenge in today's food system is variable and unknown food quality affected by various temperatures, resulting in unreliable fixed expiration dates (FED) printed on food packaging. The dynamic expiration date (DED) mode is proposed as an alternative to the FED mode; however, practitioners must guard against some major uncertainties when setting expiration dates (shelf life) for fresh food. As such, we firstly developed a computer-simulated experiment based on a shelf life prediction model for multiple scenarios (i.e., fresh food's initial quality, quality change rate, and shelf temperature) to evaluate potential retail benefits of both date modes. The results show that the DED mode is a promising approach; yet a significant difference in retail benefits emerged between the DED and FED modes. On the one hand, the DED mode could reduce food waste by 10.02% at low temperatures (0-8 degrees C), but it may increase food waste by 15.94% and 31.71% under the temperature abuse conditions of 12-18 degrees C and 20-28 degrees C, respectively. On the other hand, the expired food sold rate within the FED mode is influenced by shelf temperatures, quality change rate, and initial quality of fresh foods. A one-at-a-time perturbation analysis finds that fresh food's shelf life associated with food quality is particularly sensitive to the food waste rate and expired food sold rate in both date modes. This study supports the trade-offs in retail benefits between the two modes while encouraging retailers to proactively optimize DED use.

Automated summary

A significant challenge in today's food system is the unreliable fixed expiration dates on food packaging due to variable and unknown food quality affected by temperatures. The dynamic expiration date (DED) mode is proposed as an alternative, but practitioners must guard against uncertainties when setting expiration dates for fresh food. A computer-simulated experiment evaluates potential retail benefits of both date modes and finds a significant difference in retail benefits between the DED and fixed expiration date (FED) modes.