'Secret codes' in Sainsbury's Tesco, Aldi, Morrisons and Asda to work out food freshness

A consumer expert has given a warning to anyone buying food from the main supermarkets like Sainsbury’s Tesco, Aldi, Morrisons and Asda - and how to crack their 'secret code'.

Appearing on ITV’s This Morning expert Grace Forell said many people were confused after stores scrapped ‘best before’ dates to cut food waste,

She explained that people need to understand what they actually mean - and what the ‘internal codes’ for supermarkets actually mean. She said: ”You may have noticed that a lot of the best before dates have now gone from fruit and veg in the supermarket, and this is in a bid to help people reduce food waste, because lots of people were needlessly throwing away perfectly good food because it had gone beyond its best before date.

READ MORE: Aldi releases full list of 11 new store locations that are opening this year

READ MORE: 'I'm trying to cut down my alcohol intake and this 99p low-calorie drink converted me'

"But that’s really just anindicator of when food is at peak quality. It’s not like a use by date, which is actually about food safety.”

The food safety expert said it was down to people to check themselves if the item hasn’t got a strict use by date: “So if you buy a piece of food that doesn’t have a use by date, you can assume that it’s fine as long as it smells and looks and tastes fresh.”

But she added that people need to know the key ‘codes’ supermarketsuse to indicate freshness. She said: “If you want to ensure that you are picking the freshest fruit and veg in the supermarket, there are these codes written on the packaging. Now to be clear, these aren’t the same as best before dates. They’re more of an internal code used by the supermarkets to demonstrate the kind of the freshness rotation.

“I’m going to show you how to decipher code just for people that work in the supermarket that they don’t want that consumers they feel don’t need to know. Because it’s the best before date, really, you know, it’s not like a use by date.

“So I’m going to start with Asda and Tesco because they use a similar system. Now, what they do is they have a letter followed by a number, and these letters correlate to the month of the year.

“So January is A, February is B, H is August. So if you go into Asda or Tesco now, you’ll see. A lot of H’s and the 7 is just the day that it’s at the peak. It’s just an indicator.”

She added: “Sainsbury’s is a little bit different. So the code on Sainsbury’s items, they always start with a J and end in an S because this stands for J Sainsbury. So you can kind of disregard those letters and just look at the um numbers in the middle, and that is the date. So it’s the 7th of the 8th in this case. Again, very, very easy really, right, once you know that all supermarkets have a different way of doing it.

“Morrison’s is a little bit different, so they use the real first letter of the month. So in this case it’s A for August. So this is the 12th of August. So that’s basically it with the major supermarkets.”