Reselling Clearance Food: The UK Rules for Retailers

Clearance food is legal to sell, and most of it sells exactly as it arrives. A tin past its best-before, a case of biscuits from a delisted range, a pallet of pasta in last year's livery: none of it needs anything doing to it before it goes on a shelf. What changes is who answers for it. Once the stock is in your building, the date checks, the shelf and the labelling are yours. This guide is written for trade buyers putting clearance food in front of shoppers, whether that is a value store, an independent grocer, a market stall or an online shop. The desk sells clearance stock to registered trade buyers, and every food load arrives with the date position of each line declared. What follows is what the rules ask of you once it lands.

It sticks to what the Food Standards Agency and Trading Standards publish for every food business, and links their own pages rather than paraphrasing them at length. Business Companion's pages are written for England and Wales, and the FSA's registration and recall guidance covers Northern Ireland as well. In Scotland, Food Standards Scotland is the regulator to check with. For anything specific to your own premises, your local authority's food team is the place to ask.

The short answer: best before yes, use by never

The two dates do different jobs, and where UK law draws the line between them is set out in full elsewhere. For a shop, it comes down to this.

Eggs are the one exception to the conditions of sale above. They carry rules of their own on dates, and are worth checking separately if a load includes them.

Best before: the quality becomes yours

Trading Standards guidance, published through Business Companion, puts it plainly: food with a best-before or best-before-end date may be sold after it, provided it remains of good quality and fit for human consumption. Until the date, the manufacturer answers for the quality. Once a retailer sells the food after the date, the retailer does.

That is the whole of the risk, and it is a manageable one. It means checking what you put out rather than assuming the date did the checking for you.

• Sealed and sound. Packs intact, seals unbroken, nothing crushed open. A swollen, blown or leaking pack is not fit to sell, whatever its date.
• Stored the way the label says. "Store in a cool, dry place" still applies after the date, and so does "keep frozen". Stock that has been kept badly loses its quality sooner.
• Checked by line, not by load. Open a pack from a line now and then and look at it, smell it and taste it. Stale crisps or soft biscuits are a quality failure even though they are perfectly safe to eat.
• The further past, the closer the look. A tin a few months past its best-before is a different question from a bag of crisps the same distance past, and how long a line holds its quality is a judgement made product by product.

Shoppers buying past-date food are buying on price, and they come back when the quality matches the price. That is the commercial reason to check, as well as the legal one.

Use by: off sale by the end of the day

A use-by date is a safety limit, and there is no quality argument to make once it has passed. Business Companion is specific: "use by 23 January" means use by midnight on 23 January, and if the food is still on display on 24 January, an offence has been committed. It is the retailer's offence, too, even where a supplier usually checks the shelves.

For a shop taking clearance food, that sets the routine.

• Check the dates every day, before opening or after closing, rather than leaving it to whoever delivers.
• Move anything past its use-by out of customers' reach, into a container marked "Not for sale", until it goes.
• Price for the time left. Short-dated use-by lines need reducing while there is still selling time on them, not on the last afternoon.

The desk never trades food past its use-by. Chilled loads are offered with the use-by position of each line and the storage temperatures up front, and the chilled and frozen stream sets out how they move.

Changing a date

A food business, retailers included, can change a best-before date, but it then becomes responsible for the accuracy of the new date, and Trading Standards advise doing the research and testing to support it before it goes on a pack. A use-by date cannot be changed at all. Freezing is the main case the rule allows for: a business that freezes a product has to give it a new durability date and the storage instructions to go with it.

For a shop reselling clearance stock, none of that is worth doing. Sell on the original date, show it clearly and price the stock for what it is. The original date is what the shopper is getting a lower price for, and a pack that has been re-dated raises questions that a clearly marked one never does.

Keep the date where the shopper can see it

• Nothing covers the date. The date mark must stay clearly legible and easily visible, and it must not be obscured, or partly obscured, by a price sticker or anything else. Put the price label beside the date, never on it.
• Tell shoppers it has passed. Trading Standards advise making sure customers know a best-before has expired before they decide to buy. Many value shops give past-date lines a shelf of their own or a clear sign, and a note on the price label works as well.
• Online, say it in the listing. A shopper buying from a website or a social media page cannot turn the pack over, so the date, and the fact that it has passed, belong in the listing itself.

Labels: English, with the allergens in it

UK food labelling rules require the compulsory information on prepacked food to be in English, either printed on the pack or on a label attached to it, as Business Companion's guide to labelling language sets out. Clearance loads carry their share of export packs and imported lines, so this is the label check that comes up most often.

• Read the pack, not just the manifest. A good manifest names the market a line was packed for, but what counts is what is printed on the pack in your hand.
• The allergens come with the English. The 14 allergens UK food law names must be emphasised in the ingredients list of prepacked food, for example in bold, italics or a different colour. An English label added to a foreign pack has to carry the full compulsory information, ingredients and emphasised allergens included, so it is a job for someone holding the product's full specification, not a translation from the picture on the front.
• Breaking cases is fine; repacking is not a shelf job. Selling the retail units out of a case changes nothing, because each unit carries its own label. Opening packs and putting the food into new ones makes you the packer, and the new packs need labelling of their own.

Recalls, withdrawals and the paper trail

Every food business must be able to withdraw or recall unsafe food, and must keep traceability records so that it can. GOV.UK's guide to running a food business lists what those records hold: the name and address of every supplier and of every business you supply, the type and quantity of products, and the dates of each transaction and delivery. Sales to shoppers do not go on the record; sales to other businesses do.

• Keep the batch codes with the stock. Most prepacked food carries a lot or batch mark so that it can be traced and recalled, and where a date shows at least the day and the month, the date itself can serve as that mark. A recall names the batch, and the code on your shelf is what tells you whether it is yours.
• Get the alerts. The Food Standards Agency publishes product recalls and allergy alerts and sends them to anyone who signs up. For a shop buying clearance stock from more than one source, it is the simplest way to hear about one.
• Act on the notice. Take the named batches off sale, keep them apart and follow what the notice says happens next. The FSA's guidance on withdrawals and recalls sets out who does what.

Every food load the desk offers comes with its manifest, date codes and traceability up front, so your record starts with the paperwork that arrives with the pallets. What a clearance manifest should state covers the rest of that paperwork, and how to price a load before you commit to it.

Register before you sell

Any business that sells food has to register with its local authority, and the FSA's registration guidance is clear that this covers businesses trading from home, from a stall or a van, and those that sell only online. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, registration comes at least 28 days before trading starts. It applies to traders and brokers working from an office too, even where no food is kept on the premises.

Registered businesses are inspected and given a food hygiene rating. The FSA's Safer food, better business pack for retailers is written for small shops setting up their food safety procedures, and it is a sensible place to start before the first load arrives.

At goods-in

GOV.UK's guidance for food businesses asks for three checks on every delivery: that chilled and frozen food is cold enough, that the packaging is not damaged, and that it is what you ordered. If food looks as though it has not been handled safely, or is of poor quality, do not put it out; contact the supplier straight away. For a clearance load, add the checks that this guide has covered.

• Dates and batch codes, read off the packs and checked against the manifest, line by line.
• Which date each line carries. Best-before lines and use-by lines go to different places and run on different routines.
• English labelling, or a note of the lines that need it before they go out.
• Damage, and whether it stops at the outer case or reaches the packs inside.
• Temperature, for anything chilled or frozen, taken before the load is signed for.

Photograph anything that does not match while the pallet is still intact. It is far easier to settle a difference with a supplier at goods-in than after the stock has been broken down and put away.

What the desk does before a load reaches you

Every load offered to the buyer list declares the date position of each line. Best-before-passed stock is marked as such with the original date shown, so you know what you are buying before you reply, not at goods-in. Nothing past its use-by is traded, at any price. Clearance food and groceries is the deepest stream the desk trades, and its page sets out what lands in it and who buys it.

The shelf, the date checks and the records are yours. The desk's part is to make sure you start with the information each of them needs.

Next steps

1. Register with your local authority if you have not already, and sign up for the FSA's recall and allergy alerts.
2. Set the routine: daily date checks, a not-for-sale container for anything past its use-by, and a clear sign or shelf for past-best-before lines.
3. Decide what you will take: the categories you already sell, how far past best-before your shoppers will go, and how much date life you need on use-by lines.
4. Join the buyer list with that remit, and see what lands in clearance food and groceries.

Questions first? Ask the desk about what you sell and what would suit it.