“Best by” dates are important. They’re crucial to ensuring that the food you’re eating is still safe for consumption. For this reason, it’s never a good idea to eat food past its expiration or “best by” date. But can you even really trust the dates the food you buy is labeled with?
In most cases, of course, you can. However, one clip making the rounds on TikTok shows the shocking truth about the tactics certain establishments use in order to sell items well past the date they’ve actually expired. The clip, which originally aired on the TV show Marketplace a few years back and has since resurfaced, features a bakery store clerk explaining the methods she was encouraged to use at her former job—and they’re quite shocking. Learn more below.
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Former bakery clerk shows shocking tactics to extend sell-by dates
In this resurfaced clip, the former bakery clerk, who asked the show to blur her face for her privacy, gave an inside look at some of the shocking things the bakery would do in order to sell items well past their original “sell by” dates. (We hope the Walmart bakery would never do this to us!)
For starters, the clerk explained that they would simply cut expired cakes in half and add new stickers to each half. “If it wasn’t selling we would cut the cake in half, and each half would be packaged on its own, and each of the halves would have a new best before date put on it,” she explained. “They had stickers on them for about two more weeks.” This is especially concerning when you think about some of the recent hospitalizations and recalls that have been happening.
Things get really gross when she shows what the bakery would do to tarts with bad fruit on them. “We would take them, and we would scrape off the fruit as it got older or less desirable looking or moldy,” she explains, demonstrating by scraping berries off of a tart. Wait, moldy?! Yes, moldy.
“And then we would just re-top it with new fruit and we would reglaze it and then we would put it back in the display case until this fruit wasn’t looking very good anymore,” she concluded. Yikes! We’ll be sticking to our Trader Joe’s sheet cakes, thank you very much.
TikTok users react to sketchy bakery procedures
Understandably, commenters on TikTok are disgusted.
"This is so wrong," one person wrote, followed by some shocked emojis.
"SHAME," another wrote. "If you see something say something this is not right. Report your employer. You're an accessory to the crime. Killing customers."
Luckily, someone stepped in to assure everyone that not all bakeries are as careless—so there's still hope for all those Costco pies. "I was a baker at a grocery store and we would clear EVERYTHING out that had the day before or if it had 3 day of expiration. WE NEVER DID THIS," they wrote.
Phew! However, this is still a sign to use your best judgement and be extra careful about the food you consume. You never really know how long it's been on the shelf (or in the display case).
