They said “the water doesn’t have an expiration date, the plastic bottle does” so how come honey that comes in a plastic bottle doesn’t expire?
In: Chemistry
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There’s two concepts of foods “expiring” One is how long can you guarantee it doesn’t go bad, and the other is how long can you guarantee it doesn’t change at all. For example, milk will spoil and be undrinkable within a few days of the expiry date. Honey in itself will never rot or go bad per se, but eventually itll crystallize and you won’t be able to use it anymore. Or the water in your bottle will taste bad due to the bottle or otherwise, even though it’s technically just the same water.
Companies will put an expiration date because they prefer you throw out their product than to use something that isn’t the best that it can be. If you drank water that was past it’s “expiry date” and it tasted bad, you probably wouldn’t buy it again. If they scared you off from drinking it you might just go and buy more.
EDIT: Yeah ok, so apparently crystallized honey is still usable TIL, but the point still stands. Eventually, it will become something that they did not originally intend to sell in one way or another. My bottle of honey I have at home has a best before date, its in about 2 years. In 2 years it will still be honey, just maybe not in a form that someone would find appealing to grab off a shelf.
Unless the water has been sterilised, it can start growing things in it. In Finland we stamp dates on it because over time the microbes have grown to a level that there is a health risk. The problem is not water, but microbes.
Honey is actively anti-microbial, also it is basically just sugar, to the point basically nothing will grow on it.
Plastic that is in sunlight does have a relatively fast “expiration date”. What happens is sunlight hits the plastic, destabilizes it and causes what are called plasticizers to leach into the water which will give it the plastic taste, as you are likely drinking minute amounts of microplastics. If properly stored, the shelf life of water bottles is likely extremely long.
This does not happen which thick walled plastic bottles such as reusable nalgene bottles as they are made of a different type of plastic that is not nearly as likely to emit the plasticizers.
There is a bit of psychology to this employed by food manufacturers. The ones I worked with intentionally labelled products with much shorter expiry dates than the product actually has. This is to subtly communicate that the product is high quality and to stop big retailers buying years of product at once at cripplingly low discounts . There are other reasons for it like legal requirements from state or country level causing blanket labelling procedures as well however.
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