Compliant Date Formats for Food Labels in Canada

"Best before": when it's mandatory, when it isn't

A meal-kit company launches a new fresh pasta sauce with a 75-day shelf life, confident that dating rules are "a formality" since the product is refrigerated and obviously perishable-looking. Three months later, a routine retailer audit flags the label for missing a best-before date entirely, because at 75 days, it isn't optional. One thing decides this: your product's shelf life. If it's 90 days or less, a "best before" date is mandatory for the vast majority of prepackaged foods, with a few exemptions under the Food and Drug Regulations, such as fresh prepackaged fruits and vegetables. Beyond 90 days, it becomes optional, you can choose to include it or not.

We regularly see producers assume the date is optional for everyone. Under the 90-day mark, it isn't a choice.

This is where a shelf-life study matters as much as the date format itself. If you've never formally tested how long your product actually stays safe and at peak quality, you're guessing at which side of the 90-day line you're on, and guessing wrong in either direction creates a problem, whether that's an unnecessary date on a shelf-stable product or a missing one on something that needed it.

The exact format the CFIA requires

The required order is year-month-day. The month has to be spelled out in both official languages, or replaced with one of the recognized two-letter bilingual codes: JA, FE, MR, AL, MA, JN, JL, AU, SE, OC, NO, DE.

This is the kind of detail that slips between templates when several product formats share the same base artwork. Before every new print run, confirm the exact date format with your printer instead of copying an old file forward.

We've caught this exact slip on proofs more than once: a template built for one product line gets reused for a new item, and the date code carries over from the old format, sometimes still showing the wrong month abbreviation for a run that was supposed to use a different one. It's an easy fix before printing and a full reprint after.

Best before vs. expiration date (EXP)

The two don't mean the same thing, and mixing them up gets expensive. "Best before" tells you about freshness, taste, and peak nutritional value, it doesn't guarantee the product is still safe past that date.

The expiration date (EXP) is a safety statement. It's only mandatory for six specific categories: infant formula, human milk fortifiers, liquid diet products, meal replacements, nutritional supplements, and very low-energy foods. Past that date, the product can't legally be sold or consumed, full stop.

Mixing the two up isn't just a labelling technicality, a product that's still legally sellable after its best-before date (most foods) versus one that legally can't be sold past its EXP date (infant formula, meal replacements, and the other listed categories) creates very different obligations for retailers holding your inventory. Getting this wrong on a purchase order or a retailer's inventory system, not just the label, can create bigger problems than the print run itself.

"Packaged on": the alternative for shorter shelf lives

For a food packaged at the retail location with a shelf life of 90 days or less, the law allows a "packaged on" date to replace the "best before" date, along with shelf-life information. This alternative doesn't apply to products with a shelf life over 90 days, beyond that threshold, no date is required at all, neither "best before" nor "packaged on."

This option gets used most by delis, bakeries, and prepared-food counters packaging products in-house at the point of sale, a rotisserie chicken or a pre-made sandwich packaged that morning doesn't need a lab-calculated best-before date, just a packaged-on date paired with clear shelf-life guidance for the customer.

Storage instructions: the mention that comes attached

Whenever a product needs a "best before" date and requires conditions other than normal room temperature, refrigeration, freezing, storage instructions become mandatory on the label too. The two requirements trigger together, not one without the other.

We see this pairing get missed when a product's format changes, say, a shelf-stable sauce reformulated into a fresh, refrigerated version. The team updates the recipe and the best-before date but forgets that the new version also needs "keep refrigerated" on the label, because the two requirements were never separated to begin with in the old shelf-stable format.

The mistakes that get expensive at print time

The most common one: a date printed too light or placed on a busy background, unreadable once the product is on the shelf. Next is the month code that isn't bilingual, easy to miss when you're editing an existing template instead of starting fresh.

The costliest trap is a product reformulation that changes the real shelf life without anyone going back to check whether the "best before" date is still optional or just became mandatory. Every recipe change deserves a date-format review, not just an ingredient review.

None of these mistakes show up until the product is already on a truck or a shelf. That's what makes date-format errors different from a lot of other label issues, they're invisible on a screen proof and often invisible on a physical proof too, until someone checks the actual printed date under store lighting.