My hubby takes his lunch to work. He's not a PB and J kind of guy, so lunch for him is never a no-brainer for me. So a while back, I found a refrigerated lasagna product that he liked. It wasn't too spicy. It wasn't too saucy. It cooked in a short amount of time (he only gets 1/2 hour for lunch) and it was readily available at Wal-Mart as soon as I walked into the door. Yay! We can add this lunch product into the lunch rotation!
Now, because we've been 'burned' before, I rarely blindly buy refrigerated food without looking at the date on the product.
I wanted to buy this lasagna about 2 weeks ago but I noticed that the use by date was 2 days past. I dug through the refrigerated case and found one within date. Groovy.. all is well. Didn't give the expiration date issue another thought. I mean, who hasn't looked at the date on a product and put it down and stood on their tip toes and reached in the back to find one with a better expiration date? Okay, maybe you're not all 5' tall - so maybe no tip-toes were involved, but I'm sure you get what I'm saying. Expiration dates matter!
I know that sometimes in a grocery store that expired stuff doesn't get pulled off the shelf until a day or two past it's expiration. It's annoying but it's a fact of life, at least in my shopping experience. I never complained about it because if it was meat, it was usually past it's selling prime by hours (I typically shop after midnight) and I figure when the morning shift comes in, it'll be taken care of. If the date bothered me, I just didn't buy it or found one with a more acceptable date. After all, I'm not the food patrol.
Fast forward 10 days. I was in Wal-Mart tonight and wanted to pick up lasagna for the hubby's lunch this week. I checked the first lasagna - 'enjoy or freeze by July 20, 2011'. I put that one down as it's August 1, 2011 and upon further examination the package had a slight top bulge to it that meat gets when it's on the funky side. I picked up another lasagna and it also read "enjoy or freeze by July 20, 2011'. Ditto for the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th lasagna. That was the entire stock on the shelf. 7 expired lasagnas with slightly bulging tops.
Not only are they selling refrigerated products well past their sell-by date, they are also selling baked goods that are past their 'sell by' date as well. Their pies (those tiny lunch size ones) had dates on them back to July 30th. This isn't the first time there have been pies for sale past their 'sell by' date at this location. But again, I just looked until I found one with a better expiration date.
Again, it's August 1st. Now, I highly doubt anyone is going to get ill from eating an apple pie 2 days past it's prime. It might just not be as yummy. But eating a product with meat in it twelve days or longer past it's prime? That's probably going to result in logging some serious bathroom time at the very least and not really a position you want to be in while at work.
So I intend to call Wal-Mart. And I'm not going to be happy with an 'um, okay, we'll let someone know'. This is meat nearly two entire weeks past it's prime. If I don't take action, I wonder how much longer it will sit there, tempting some hurried shopper looking to fulfill an Italian craving for dinner... particularly one with bad eyesight. Those 'enjoy by' dates aren't the easiest to see... a pale yellow on a black container and it's some of them are a little smudged. I even double checked to be sure I wasn't reading 'July 28 as opposed to July 20' since the '0' and the '8' look similar (at least through my eyes). And even then, it was still expired food. But the date on the 7 containers of lasagna was most definitely, without a doubt, July 20, 2011.
These are two products, past their freshness date, that I had planned on purchasing at our new Wal-Mart. I purposely went there to buy those two items. I didn't just stumble onto them. And this isn't my first experience with food past it's sell by date at this Wal-Mart. I wonder how many other products are sitting on the shelf, past their prime, just waiting to make someone sick - not just at Wal-Mart but anywhere food is sold?
Update: I was doing a search on expired foods in grocery stores and came across two articles/blogs of interest. One was done by NBC news and lists Wal-Mart as the 9th worst offender of selling expired food and health violations out of the 10 they listed. NBC report on expired foods in grocery stores "9) Wal-Mart and Save-a-Lot. Not far behind we had two chains tied for ninth place? Wal-Mart and Save-a-lot. Over 10 inspections both averaged 9 critical violations.".
And here's from a coupon blog Blogger exposes grocery store expired food. In her blog, the food was from 2007 in a Chicago store, so I guess maybe finding food 12 days expired isn't too bad - but still - do you want to spend money on expired food to potentially get ill from it?!!
