Especially foods with a long shelf life. How do they know it’ll keep for 27 months or whatever?
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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.
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