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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

You know who hates food waste more than Gavin Newsom? Every greedy supermarket market executive that throws away 30% of their inventory. Especially when their profit margins are often in the low single digits.

The article says there is no mandates on any types of dates. So I imagine these dates serve some purpose, otherwise they wouldn't be there. Laws like this often sound like they're helping but since no one is forcing the hand of retailers, so I would be they end up increasing costs. Maybe not food waste per-se, but some costs that originally tipped the retailers to have these dates in the first place.

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Seems like the food producer would have a clear incentive to mark their products with sell by dates.

If I’m making a food product for sale at retail and I can mark it “sell by” some date, consumers get confused and think it’s no good after that date, the store that buys my food product will not want to keep it on the shelf because consumers won’t buy it.

The retailer has to discard the perfectly fine item and reorder from… me the food product producer and then I make more money.

I imagine the food retailers are happy about this and the food manufacturers are probably unhappy.

I think you can come up with a lot of scenarios in which any one person is happy or not happy. But in complicated systems, it's impossible to know exactly and you have to rely on market forces to work these things out. The problem is people coming in without any humility and trying to tinker with the system and getting shocked when there is unexpected consequences.

You’re right that the dates serve other purposes. The incentives aren’t as simple as avoiding wasted product.

Shelf space is valuable. Food that expires is inventory that’s not selling for some reason, or it wouldn’t be on the shelf long enough to expire. It’s taking up space that could instead be used for other inventory that does sell well. So even inventory that doesn’t expire at all will get put on the discount rack to get rid of it, or finally thrown out if doesn’t sell even at a cheap price.

The best way to avoid waste is to only buy food that actually sells, the quicker the better. Easier said than done, though.

Also, even greedy supermarket execs need to worry about their store’s reputation if they sell people food that doesn’t taste right too often.

The grocery industry is heavily monopolized. No where more so than on the west coast. They don't care about their reputation because there mostly is nowhere else for you to legitimately go to.

Nearby: Safeway, Lucky’s, Target, Trader Joe’s, Ranch 99, Costco, Walmart, Cardenas, Pak N’ Save, and I’m sure I missed some. Also, a lot of Asian food marts that aren’t chains. That seems like quite a lot of competition?

Safeway is owned by Albertsons. So is Lucky's. There are 58 total Ranch 99's in the USA. Costco requires membership up front. Cardenas is owned by KKR. Pak N Save is a subsidary of Safeway and also owned by Albertons. Walmart is not a grocery store.

So, no, not a lot of competition.

You really should look into grocery M&A's over the past few years. This is all easy to see if you care to _actually_ look.

Have you been to a Walmart recently? Many of their stores have groceries.

Walmart is the biggest grocery retailer in the US with a solid multiple more sales than the next largest, Albertsons/Safeway group (per WSJ article in last month or so, don’t have link handy)

Not sure whether it was the removal of best before dates or Brexit, but fresh food and veg in Britain is often already rotting in supermarkets. So now instead of the store throwing out loads of produce past its best, I have to do it when I get home and realise that yet again one in each pack of 3 onions is rotted.

How were they labeling the produce before? Individually? Or by the box?

I haven't seen dated produce, but maybe it's hidden.

Been seeing that in the states too. A lot of old produce, but I blame high prices not moving it fast enough.

> I have to do it when I get home and realise that yet again one in each pack of 3 onions is rotted.

I have always been under the impression that the entire point of pre-packaging produce like avocados, apples, and garlic is to mix items that are bad which no one would buy in with some good items so you can still sell the bad ones.

This seems to have always been the case in California - where you can generally get good produce.

Fair, although previously I’d buy the same three packs without issue.

The UK hasn't banned them, though some supermarkets did voluntarily remove them. Brexit's a relatively likely culprit for imported stuff; the extra paperwork really disincentivises JIT delivery (and in particular _really_ disincentivises mixed contents containers).

Though it'll get worse. The regime for imported fruit and veg is still in transition, with a lot of stuff that the UK was supposed to bring in in 2021 recently delayed til 2025.

> Especially when their profit margins are often in the low single digits.

This is a little misleading, since a lot of their product on their shelve isn't paid for until 60/90/180/365 days after receiving it, and generally suppliers set aside money to help cover shrinkage. And they'll often agree to take back unsold goods.

There's a reason that so many of the largest companies in the USA are/were retailers. Borrowing something worth $100, then selling it for $103 may be low margin, but it scales incredibly well.

> The law prohibits the use of consumer-facing sell-by dates, and also requires standardized language for date labels.

It appears that it does not preclude tracking sell-by for internal inventory management purposes (such as with a handheld scanner already used in grocery stores for various purposes, or possibly some kind of opaque but human readable code), just to avoid customer confusion including it explicitly on the package.

Why do you assume the legislators didn’t talk to industry executives? I’m sure they did and all these issues were discussed

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