A new ‘Smell-by’ label has been invented to help people know whether their food has actually gone bad, or if it’s still good to consume.
Best Before dates. Despite what many people think, these labels don’t actually tell you whether your food is safe to eat.
Surprised? Well, you wouldn’t be alone.
According to a statement from the mobile app Too Good To Go, a third of Brits rely solely on Best Before labels when deciding whether their food has gone bad. The problem? These dates are indicators of quality, not safety.
They’re only there to tell you when your bread will be at its softest and your lettuce leaves will be at their crunchiest.
In other words, that means that we’re throwing away thousands of tonnes of perfectly edible, delicious food–all because of a little label that’s just trying to say that your food isn’t quite as fresh as it once was.
So Too Good To Go came up with an idea. ‘Smell-by’ labels.
How Smell By labels work
Covering off four commonly wasted products (oats, orange juice, eggs, and beer), these scratch ‘n’ sniff sticker labels will train your nose to know exactly what your food would smell like if it was really no longer okay to eat.
The aim? To help us all get back in touch with our common sense; trusting our senses to do their job and alert us if we’re hovering near something we shouldn’t be eating.
For the project, Too Good To Go teamed up with the world’s first professional S’mellier, Dariush Alavi, whose nostril superpowers were deployed to help prove when these foods are still good to go.
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Too Good To Go is planning to work with retailers in the future to help the stickers reach labeling on your packages. For now though, they can be ordered free from this website. So what are you waiting for?
(WATCH the ‘scratch ‘n’ sniff’ stickers in action in the video below.)
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