Do you sell products that are near or past their best before dates?Updated 2 months ago
here is a lot of confusion about Best Before and Use By dates so let’s explain the difference first using the Consumer.org.nz guidelines:
"Use-by dates are required for health and safety reasons to reduce the risk of people getting sick from food that’s gone bad. You’ll find use-by dates on perishable foods such as meat, poultry and deli products."
"Best-before dates are used to provide information about food quality. Most foods will have these dates. Food can be sold and eaten after its best-before date as long as it’s been stored properly. However, it may have lost some nutritional value and might not taste the best."
Confectionery is a stable product as per the Food Standards guidelines. All of our products have a Best Before date - we do not stock any products that have a Use By date. Most manufacturers will put a Best Before date many months before any loss of product freshness is noticeable as they want you to be eating their product at its optimum quality.
We import many products direct from their country of origin. For many of our imported products, this can mean a 3 month transit time.
Some seasonal products become available to us with only a short time left on their Best Before date. We prefer to still stock these products and have them available to our customers rather than deleting a product from our range.
This issue is mostly with packaged product imported from the United States. Our loose lollies for sale per 100g are not sold when passed their Best Before dates.
Most of our customers are happy with this compromise as they can still enjoy their treat from a world away! If a product has passed its Best Before date, we continue to sell it, however we will make every effort to keep an eye on it's quality, flavour and freshness (yes we taste test a lot of product!).
We will do our best to let customers know if a product is close to its expiration date or has already passed its best-before date. We will include this information in the product description.
When we are no longer happy with the quality of product available we will move the item to our websites "Seconds" page. The product will be discounted to compensate for the loss in quality. A reason for discounting the product will also be given in the product description. Click here to view our Clearance section.
We are very fortunate that the products we sell contain high levels of sugar which means they maintain their quality and freshness for far longer than other sectors.