California Bans 'Sell by' Labels, Hoping to Cut Food Waste
25 points by randycupertino 3 hours ago | 38 comments

blululu 22 minutes ago
This is a pretty nothing law when you look into it.

All it does is standardize "sell by" labels to be more transparent. The extent of the ban is the explicit phrasing "Sell By" which is itself confusing since the manufacturer has some estimated consumption interval that is tacked onto their actual expiration date. Sell By gives the customer has no idea how much padding they are adding to their estimate and when the thing actually goes bad.

All this law really does is it standardizes the labels manufacturers can use to "BEST if Used by" for quality concerns or "USE by" for safety concerns. A lot of manufacturers already do this, so it is a pretty minimal law There are probably more pressing issues in Sacramento, but a small improvement is always welcome.

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TulliusCicero 17 minutes ago
To be fair, if we waited until there "no more pressing issues", then we'd never get any "quality of life" regulations passed like this.
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Cider9986 50 minutes ago
>With 395,608 regulatory restrictions, California is the most heavily regulated state in the nation, according to the report. On average, states have 135,000 regulatory restrictions in administrative rules, with California's regulations more than doubling the national average.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2020-11-03/...

I wonder how many they've added in 5 years. Do all these laws improve peoples lives?

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m4ck_ 29 minutes ago
Well despite all that regulation, they're an economic powerhouse, they must be doing something right. CA is far from perfect but at least they occasionally aspire to do something for the benefit of their citizens - not something I can say for my 'least regulated' state that mostly just saps money from the federal government.
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roenxi 6 minutes ago
They're sitting at the centre of a web of software services that coordinate some unreasonable amount of the internet. They've definitely done something right, California might be hosting one of the most impressive economic clusters outside of China.

But that doesn't tell us much about the relationship between that thing and their regulations. The regulations might be supporting the thing, or the thing might be so successful that the damage being done by the regulations becomes tolerable. It's entirely plausible that if other states attempted that level of regulation they'd crumple like tissue paper because they don't have the economic power of California's IT sector to balance out the excess demands being placed on businesses.

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solenoid0937 14 minutes ago
N=1 but I make a good amount of money and left California for a zero tax state.

I feel like the quality of life is similar between the two. I don't feel like I was getting anything for the 13%+ extra taxes I was paying in California.

Nearly every California program has a huge amount of wastage. Take:

- High speed rail - 10x the cost of comparable European programs, still haven't built anything. Deadlocked by regulation, lawsuits, and poor planning.

- Or all the fraud in the hospice program, unchecked for years until some YouTuber just... went up to one and made a video.

- Or spending over $1M/homeless on housing the homeless and not being able to do so.

California is a lot of talk (regulations, state programs, taxes) coupled with extremely poor execution.

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Whoppertime 17 minutes ago
Despite all their problems, Detroit was an economic powerhouse. Motor city was a world class city, and they bid to host the Olympics eight times between 1944 and 1972. Detroit was far from perfect, but it seems like eventually their bad choices caught up with them. Detroit is no longer the world class city or economic powerhouse it once was.
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lostmsu 26 minutes ago
> they're an economic powerhouse

Could be inertia.

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fhdkweig 13 minutes ago
I know nothing about nothing, but I always assumed that all the money was from Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Outside of those two highly localized industries, is there really much more money than other states have?
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matwood 7 minutes ago
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matwood 10 minutes ago
Because of the power CA has, many of the regulations they pass around health and safety end up benefiting other states because it's cheaper to simply implement it nationwide.
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tikhonj 47 minutes ago
Regulations aren't fungible, so this is not a particularly meaningful perspective.
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mc32 46 minutes ago
I hope they refactor and harmonize them at some point to reduce duplication, contradiction as well as proliferation.
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vrganj 43 minutes ago
All of them? No. Some of them? Yes.

Some examples:

* ARL / Automatic Renewal Law: If a company allows you to sign up for a subscription online, they also must provide an immediate, straightforward way to cancel it online.

* SB 478: No bullshit junk fees tacked on to prices. Any price displayed, be it for concerts, hotels, or whatever else, must be the full, out-the-door price.

* SB 244: Right to Repair: Electronics and appliance manufacturers must make diagnostic tools, manuals etc available for at least 7 years after manufacture.

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WaxProlix 34 minutes ago
Does SB478 apply to car dealerships? That would be a huge boon to consumers on its own.
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luisln 31 minutes ago
Car dealerships were exempt from SB 478.

However, California's CARS Act, which took effect July 1, 2025, prohibits misrepresentations about the costs or terms of purchasing, financing, or leasing a vehicle, including the availability of vehicles at an advertised price.

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bofadeez 26 minutes ago
[flagged]
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galleywest200 25 minutes ago
> * Just look at the actual checkout price like everyone else

Why should I have to go through the entire process just to see the price? Have you ever been in a store that has the tax added onto the price tag? It is very nice to not have to do mental math.

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roenxi 4 minutes ago
[delayed]
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morkalork 19 minutes ago
What, you don't run through the checkout process on each of 100 different Airbnb listings and compile a spreadsheet of results to ascertain the true prices after fees and charges? That's gotta be the best part of vacation planning after buying plane tickets!
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vrganj 21 minutes ago
I'm not an American at all.

And all of these are definitely worse than just making the vendor behave properly...

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zeroonetwothree 56 minutes ago
I'm curious why food producers didn't do this on their own, since no one likes "sell by" anyway? Or was there an existing regulation that got changed?

In any case I think the new way is better.

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m4ck_ 42 minutes ago
I'm pretty sure food producers are the ones putting the "sell by" labels on stuff, with the hope that people will needlessly throw away food and buy more because of that label.
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skybrian 20 minutes ago
They don't want grocery stores to carry product that's too old because customers will try it and decide they don't like it, not realizing that it's old. And a grocery store worker won't know when to get rid of it unless someone tells them.

And from a grocery store's point of view, product that's on the shelf too long isn't selling. It's taking up space that could be used for something else.

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sega_sai 43 minutes ago
Presumably food producers benefit if people throw things out earlier, as they will buy more ?
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sega_sai 39 minutes ago
In the end, standardization of this type of things can only be good even if the effect on waste is small. There is no need to create additional ways to confuse people.
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skybrian 24 minutes ago
> Experts say the term “sell by” is generally for retailers to know when to rotate inventory, compared with labels like “best if used by” and “use by,” which indicate quality.

...

> Under the state’s bill, “sell by” dates can still be included on products as long as they are “coded” — information that is aimed at retailers rather than consumers.

This is about obfuscating "sell by" dates so customers don't get confused. They might not necessarily add another date you can read easily. Then if the grocery store forgets to replace old stock, you will never know.

But maybe someone can write an app to read the codes?

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ChrisArchitect 11 minutes ago
Previous discussion when the bill was passed in 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41765006
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irishcoffee 48 minutes ago
It’s be pretty cool if they figured out their water problem instead of passing all these nebulous laws that don’t push the needle any.
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lokar 45 minutes ago
The only water problems are for farmers growing in a semi-arid valley. California has droughts, not water shortages.
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EgregiousCube 31 minutes ago
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lokar 24 minutes ago
I’m not sure what to focus on in that site, what did you have in mind?

Agg uses like 80% of consumer water. Almost all of this is land that has only been farmed since the Feds build a bunch of water projects starting in the 30s.

Most of the irrigated farm land is owned by big corporations and extremely wealthy families. They push a narrative of mismanagement and shortages to get urban areas to use less and less while they resist investing in better irrigation methods.

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yieldcrv 42 minutes ago
can’t wait for a new Regulatory Liability fee to be added to checks here
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exabrial 2 hours ago
We should ban the sale of band-aids, so that people stop injuring themselves.
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cleaning 2 hours ago
"Sell by" is instead replaced with clearer, more standardized wording. Please at least read the (very short) article before posting.
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jrussino 48 minutes ago
To be fair, it's a bad title.

We should be able to skim the headlines and get an accurate impression of the news items of the moment.

This headline seems intentionally misleading. It should have been clear to the publisher that it would be interpreted this way. Intentionally inflammatory clickbait titles poison the information ecosystem.

(That being said - yes, commenting on something you have not read does as well!)

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SilasX 41 minutes ago
Agreed. In this case, a better title would be "California replaces 'Sell by' Labels with 'Use by', Hoping to Cut Food Waste"

Still a simplification, but doesn't horribly mislead you into thinking it's a reckless policy.

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garciansmith 2 hours ago
Did you read what they are replacing it with? I.e., "best if used by" (indicating the time the item is at its best quality), "best if frozen by", and "use by" (indicating when the food is and isn't safe to eat). Because those seem much more clear and useful to me than the useless "sell by" date.
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lokar 43 minutes ago
The subtitle:

The law standardizes language around expiration dates, aiming to minimize confusion about when food is safe to eat. More than one-third of food sold nationwide is wasted, the U.S.D.A. says.

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rdiddly 52 minutes ago
The explanation is in the subtitle. Didn't even have to read the article on this one.
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