Especially foods with a long shelf life. How do they know it’ll keep for 27 months or whatever?
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They don’t really know, thats why some food spoils faster than the date. They just know how long the food has until its freshness or “perfect flavor” is left until its not in a sellable quality
The “best before” date is actualy a “tastes optimal if opened before”. It’s a guestimate, based on experiments. It has nothing to do with food spoiling, so they can afford to approximate.
Usually, there are some tests before launching some new product line with different sealed containers sitting there for different amounts of time at room temperature or fridges. For dates a year or more away, they guess using science. Petri dish cultures, for example, can help them extrapolate future dates just by watching the bacteria growth rate.
A relative of mine used to work in the field of frozen food. They conducted a “crash test”: If you defrost and re-freeze food several times, this mimics “decay” in a quicker way. From those results, they could figure out shelf life (without actually having to wait e.g. 27 months).
It is completely unregulated except for infant food and formula. That said, companies tend to err on the side of caution as it’s better for business for customers to throw out products that might still be edible as opposed to facing lawsuits over spoiled food.
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