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Wilton Expiration Date Code
Expired? Who the hell knows?
I'm over Celebrations which means I have some stuff in my department that's perishable.. candy melts, fondant, cake decorations, piñata filler, stuff like that. I set the mods recently, so I thought this would be as good a time as any to sift through the product and get rid of older stuff that's close to expiring.
I'd forgotten what a chore it was.
Almost none of the packages have actual dates that human beings can read. I love you in telugu. Most of the packaging has an internal date code stamped on it, something like 160326CB3, which Wilton employees can probably read easily but to your average consumer, or Walmart associate, it looks like random gibberish. Om namah shivaya krishna das.
There's absolutely nothing on the WIRE that tells you how to read these codes. I had to do extensive hunting online to get it all figured out. Turns out that a lot of the time, the first two numbers (16 in this example) is the year the product was manufactured (2016) and that the next three numbers are the calendar day it was made (032 would be the thirty-second day of the calendar year, or February 1st).
But wait, we're not done yet! Different products all have a different shelf life. Cake frosting might only be good for 12 months, but food coloring might last for 24 months, while sprinkles may be fine for as long as 36 months. So, you figure out the manufacturing date and then add anywhere from one to three years, depending on the specific product.
I had to take the initiative to teach myself how to do this; nobody at my store had any clue how to figure any of it out. It's a small wonder customers haven't died after consuming stuff out of that department.
(When I was on the beginning-of-the-year refresh crew a few years back, we dug through most of the grocery department, resetting mods but also looking at expiration dates. I found bags of Halloween candy that were stuffed underneath the regular bags of candy. I found a couple of bags that were two years old and one bag that had been sitting there for three years.)
Why can't Wilton just print a normal date like '02/01/2018' that would be easy to read? Associates could actually find expired stuff in a timely manner without having to hunt for a secret decoder ring, and customers could know whether what they were buying was actually safe to consume.
The U.S. does not have a uniform system of coding expiration dates on food products as of 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The federal government only requires expiration dates on baby foods and infant formula. Other dating on food products is voluntary. Open dating uses calendar dates and closed, or coded, dating is a process used by manufacturers to help with managing inventory. Closed coding is used on products with longer shelf lives, such as canned and boxed foods. The USDA notes that while closed codes could refer to manufacturing date, the codes are not intended for consumer use and no single translation source exists.