This is the date by which you should eat the food, as suggested by its manufacturer. It doesn’t mean the food is necessarily bad or unsafe to eat after that date, but you should be more cautious. Use-by dates are usually found on products with a fairly short storage time, like most dairy products. One caveat here: you should treat the Use-By date on infant formula as a safety date.

This date informs the store how long to keep the food product on the shelves (or when to remove it). It’s aimed at retailers, not consumers. What’s more important to you as a buyer is that “typically one-third of a product’s shelf-life remains after the sell-by date for the consumer to use at home,” as explained by the Institute of Food Technologists.