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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Whoever said that is wrong.
The FDA and IWBA can’t find any evidence that age matters to plastic water bottles. The FDA has ruled that there is no limit to the shelf life of bottled water, and no company has even insinuated that the expiration is related to the plastic.
In 1987, New Jersey passed a law requiring all bottles of water to be stamped with an expiration date 2 years after the bottling date. Since you can’t identify which bottles will wind up shipped to NJ, companies just stamped all bottles with a 2-year expiration to ensure compliance.
They never passed that law for Honey, which is why plastic honey bottles don’t have an expiration.
Although the law was repealed in 2006, companies had figured out people will throw out “expired” water and buy more, it actually increases sales, so they kept printing it “voluntarily”.
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.
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