California Banned "Sell By": What AB 660 Changes on Your Food Packaging

Food manufactured on or after 1 July 2026 for sale in California may carry a date label only in one of four exact wordings, and the phrase "sell by" is no longer allowed on consumer-facing packaging at all. If your artwork still reads "Sell By" or "Best Before", the product cannot legally be offered for sale in the state. AB 660 is the first state law in the country to standardise date wording this way, and it is already in force.

What exactly does California require on the label now?

The statute is short and unusually literal. A manufacturer, processor or retailer that chooses — or is otherwise required by law — to show a date must use "BEST if Used by" or "BEST if Used or Frozen by" for a quality date, and "USE by" or "USE by or Freeze by" for a safety date. Those are the only permitted forms. Not "Best By", not "Enjoy By", not "Freshest Before".

There is a carve-out for packs with no room. Items too small to fit the full phrase may use "BB" for a quality date and "UB" for a safety date, and beverages as defined in the Public Resources Code may use "BB" regardless of size. Retailers keep their stock-rotation dates, but only in coded form: a date code that consumers cannot easily read, and that does not spell out the banned phrase, is still permitted.

Which products are exempt?

Four categories sit outside the requirement entirely — infant formula, eggs, pasteurized in-shell eggs, and beer and other malt beverages. Wine and distilled spirits may still show production or bottling dates, including Julian dates, and where a shellfish labelling rule conflicts with the new wording, the shellfish rule prevails.

Note what the law does not do. It does not force you to put a date on anything. It governs the wording only if you choose to display a date, or if some other law already requires one. A product that has never carried a date label can carry on not carrying one.

Does this matter if you don't sell into California?

In our view, for most national brands this is a national relabel rather than a California one, and the reasoning is operational rather than legal. Running California-only artwork means a separate plate set, a separate print run and a separate inventory pool for one state's version of an otherwise identical carton — plus the standing risk that the wrong pallet ships to the wrong distribution centre. The usual rule of thumb is that a single compliant SKU beats two compliant SKUs unless the label real estate genuinely cannot absorb the change.

The federal direction of travel points the same way. FSIS and the FDA jointly requested public information on standardising food date labelling, and both agencies already recommend "Best if Used By" as the voluntary quality phrase. Federal law itself still does not require date labels at all, except on infant formula — which is precisely how the market drifted into so many competing phrases in the first place.

Why does the wording matter enough to legislate?

California's agriculture department, citing bill co-sponsor Californians Against Waste, counts more than 50 differently phrased date labels in use across the US, and attributes to that confusion some 2.5 billion meals worth of unspoiled food discarded in the state each year. The same page, drawing on CalRecycle, puts organic waste at 48% of what Californians send to landfill and 41% of the state's methane emissions.

Those are the legislature's stated grounds, and they are worth reading as such. The evidence that consumers misread date labels is considerably stronger than the evidence that standardising the words changes what people throw away. Treat the waste case as rationale, not as a forecast you can put in a sustainability report.

Which phrase should you actually put on the pack?

This is now a substantive choice rather than a formatting one. "BEST if Used by" says quality may decline after the date. "USE by" says the food is not safe after it. Reaching for the safety phrase because it sounds more authoritative commits you to defending that date as a safety threshold, and on a shelf-stable product it is closer to a misbranding exposure than a marketing decision. Pick the quality phrase unless you have shelf-life data that genuinely supports a safety claim.

That data question is the one most teams underestimate. If your date was inherited rather than established, our guide to extending food shelf life through packaging covers the barrier and format levers that actually move it, and the food-safe materials and compliance guide covers the substrate side.

What has to change in practice?

Five things, in roughly the order they will bite:

• Artwork and the date panel. "BEST if Used by" is longer than most phrases it replaces. Check it fits the printed field and does not collide with the coder's print window.
• Coder message templates. Inkjet and laser coder messages are configured per line and per SKU. Retail-pack coding and case coding are separate jobs; changing one does not change the other.
• Small and single-serve formats. These are the packs most likely to need the abbreviated forms, and the ones where the phrase change is most likely to force a layout revision.
• Reduced-oxygen packaging plans. The Retail Food Code shelf-life cap for reduced-oxygen packs now keys to the new safety date rather than the old sell-by or use-by date, so HACCP paperwork referencing the old wording needs revising.
• Sell-through of existing stock. The trigger is the manufacture date, not the sale date. Product made before the cutover can continue to sell through on its old label.

If the phrase change forces you back into the artwork anyway, it is worth doing the layout properly rather than patching a longer string into a field sized for a shorter one; our label design and print guide covers the typography constraints. And if you are sequencing label work across the next few years, the food traceability rule is the other label-side deadline worth batching this against.

The deadline has passed, which makes this unusual among compliance jobs: there is no runway left to plan against. The work is small — a phrase, a panel, a coder template — but it sits on every SKU you sell into the largest food market in the country, and the enforcement hook is the sale itself, not an inspection.