Damn this one is tough my best guess LJ is like how the manufacturer tracks it internally or something like that and the 349 could be like eat before the 349th day of that year. Again this is just a guess probably contact the manufacturer to be 100% clear what that means.
“Best Before” doesn’t mean anything. Only “Use By” is an indicator of expired food.
This site says to use it in 1-2 months: https://rivieraseafoodclub.com/products/unagi-freshwater-eel
As many have said, the numerical digits probably refer to a Julian calendar date. Also to consider, some products list the pack date rather than the expiration date. So it’s possible these were packed in December and are already “expired”.
Year 349 since the return of Late Jesus.
It’s about 500 years in the future I think
Former grocery manager here. There are companies that purposely sell these weird cryptic date formats. I would always need to go look for their certain code to figure out what it translates to. I can’t remember why either other than it’s not normal and we just dealt with it.
Because of the other writing on the package, I’m wondering if because its sold on the international market and dates would get very confusing and possibly harmful.
More harmful than a literal code?
If you buy fresh tuna and the country of origin date code is MM/DD/YY while you’re DD/MM/YY or YY/DD/MM or YY/MM/DD you could end up with year-old fish or worse. So yeah.
And no, it won’t always be something easily detectable by look and smell like fish.
That’s why there’s an ISO standard for dates and it goes YYYY-MM-DD
That’s not even mentioning potential other calendars.
You can easily write out the month: April 1, 2024. And don’t say “people might not speak English” or Chinese or whatever. You know what language to put it in because the rest of the package has writing on it too.
plenty of packaging sold in the us is not in English if your at the hmart or wherever. they just slap an English ingredients sticker on it.
They do that with glues at my job. The code supposed to be used for quality control. Like first letter plant it was manufactured in and the second the month and so on. I think it dumb. Never seen it on food before.
Best sniffed before?
Maybe December 2022. But who knows.
It says “meilleur avant” so I think LJ is “Lundi-Jeudi”
wat
I think it’s french for Monday-Thursday.
L is probably the factory code J could be the number 9, if A=0, so the last digit of the year. So a guess would be Dec 14th 2029. Which seems like a long way off. Unless A=1, that means J=0, so 2020 and it’s expired, but maybe 2030.
It’s best before the amount of time it takes to do 349 Oh Long Johnsons.
J3 is the 3rd month that starts with J so it’s July. 49 is the 49th day of July so August 18th. easy peasy
L stands for leap year, so that tracks.
I think this means it expires 349 months after the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.
This makes the most sense.
This is the most sound flogic I have ever witness, I shall now bow down to the Grand Nagus of flogic as I am not worthy to stand with thee
Stands for “Alan please add best by date”
Some uk supermarkets have started dropping the use by date in favour of codes like this. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45786012 The article says it’s to reduce waste and that staff will have special training to know when to bin stuff. I imagine the training is in how to read the codes.
What duck heads
Should I call customer support every time I’m about to cook dinner?
I assume the point is the “best before” dates are mostly useless. They’re useful for the store, but for a customer usually you should tell by smelling and looking at it. We evolved with senses to tell us when food has gone bad. Those dates aren’t part of it. So much food is wasted because people think those are magic and should be obayed like a law.
That’s great unless you have an impaired sense of smell, like I had for the last 2 weeks following a COVID infection, or other people have permanently.
On the flip side, knowing the rough best before date helps people buy the freshest stuff, since I can’t open the cream with a date that says jr402 I won’t know if it should be good for a week or a month.
That’s the point. People will choose to buy the “freshest” stuff, meaning it created a lot of waste. If you can’t tell what freshest then it will prevent older stuff from needing to be thrown out. If it’s being sold at the store, it’s fine.
That’s fine unless you are buying well in advance and need to know it will still be good by the event. It will also prevent a customer like myself from noticing an item still on the shelf is a week past the sell-by date and should have been removed. Sealed cartons and other packaging prevents us from actually seeing the food, so someone could get home and open it and find it spoilt, wasting their money. “If it’s being sold at the store, it’s fine” is a mighty optimistic view of commerce. Even at a very well -run store I’ve found several packages of sliced Jarlsberg with mold inside, well before the date. And I received one with worse mold from a different grocery delivery. That’s a Jarlsberg problem. I check them carefully, the delivery shopper didn’t. He assumed if it was being sold in the store it was fine.
Fresh produce has it here in there Netherlands as well. Or our supermarket has for the last few years, a letter specifies the day of the week (Monday = A) and then the week number.
Week number we printed on the sticker machines and stuck on the start of every isle just to make it easier.
It refers to the year of our Lord J-town 349.
349th day of Lindon B Johnson’s term.
This may be No Stupid Questions, but there sure are a lot of stupid answers.
At least it doesn’t say LV426…
??
That’s the planet they go to in the original Alien movie. e: and the sequel as well
