MORRISONS has made a major change to more than 200 of its fresh food products, including some Christmas favourites.
Stores across the country have been getting rid of date labels and removing display until labels in an effort to prevent food waste.
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The supermarket giant has already started ditching the dates in a bid to encourage customers to use their own judgement about when food has gone off.
It comes after Morrisons came under fire after it decided to scrap “use-by” dates on milk – asking customers to use a sniff test to check if it had gone off.
The change also affects Christmas dinner favourites, such as carrots and Brussels sprouts.
Some items will have their dates removed completely, such as bananas, watermelon and pineapple.
Most will be replaced by a code system, which will be used by Morrisons colleagues to ensure fresh produce remains on the shelves.
Morrisons says it plans to extend the change to more perishable, pre-packed items such as berries, grapes and stone fruit, next year.
Damon Johnson, head of technical produce and horticulture, at Morrisons said: “People tend to over buy food for Christmas dinner to ensure plenty for all but by cooking what you need, saving veg for meals between Christmas and New Year as well as enjoying leftovers, budgets can go further.
“Now more than ever it’s important to help our customers to reduce their food waste.
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“We hope by removing dates from our produce lines, changing our messaging on packs and by providing our customers with advice on storage, we can support households in extending the life of their food and save customers money this Christmas.”
Morrisons is not the first supermarket to try and improve food waste in this way.
In September, Waitrose ditched best before dates on more than 500 of its fresh food products.
And back in 2018, Tesco decided to remove best-before dates from some of its own-label fruit and vegetables.
It’s worth remembering that “best before dates” are very different from “use by” dates and are a sign of the quality of the food.
Eating food after its use by date (unless it has been frozen on or before its use by date) could result in food poisoning.
Tips on how to reduce food waste
Making sure you don’t waste food is a great way to save money.
Meal plans are a good way to cut down on pointless waste.
Try and plan the meals you make around ingredients you can use more than once.
You can also freeze things before they go off.
For example, fruit and veg can be saved if chopped up and portioned in the freezer.
Put food in freezer bags and make sure you write a date on them, so you know when they were frozen.
You can also make big batches of meals in one go and then freeze them, as you might be able to save money when buying in bulk.
