The Vegan Thread

Seems like all kinds of poor thinking.

Best before and sell-by dates have been strongly criticised for being inaccurate – leading to perfectly fresh food being binned. In fact, these labels are often used for retailers' quality control, while the key information for consumers, for food safety reasons, is the use-by date.

So remove the useless and misleading (to the customer) information from the customer's sight. Put it in some kind of machine-readable form, for example.

And the gelatine can be adapted to match the expiry period of the food by altering the concentration. The higher the concentration, the longer the gel will stay solid.

Um, no. Even if they get the calibration right, the goods are inside a sealed container, while the gelatine is on the outside. In a typical consumer's home, jars and tins will be exposed to changes in heat and moisture and the acid sweat of the consumer's hands. The container largely protects the contents - but not the label. The label is likely to degrade at an unpredictable rate.

Not sure that labels which are designed to rot are contributing much to food hygiene.