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Former grocery manager here. There are companies that purposely sell these weird cryptic date formats. I would always need to go look for their certain code to figure out what it translates to. I can't remember why either other than it's not normal and we just dealt with it.
Because of the other writing on the package, I'm wondering if because its sold on the international market and dates would get very confusing and possibly harmful.
More harmful than a literal code?
If you buy fresh tuna and the country of origin date code is MM/DD/YY while you're DD/MM/YY or YY/DD/MM or YY/MM/DD you could end up with year-old fish or worse. So yeah.
And no, it won't always be something easily detectable by look and smell like fish.
That’s why there’s an ISO standard for dates and it goes YYYY-MM-DD
You can easily write out the month: April 1, 2024. And don't say "people might not speak English" or Chinese or whatever. You know what language to put it in because the rest of the package has writing on it too.
plenty of packaging sold in the us is not in English if your at the hmart or wherever. they just slap an English ingredients sticker on it.
That's not even mentioning potential other calendars.
ISO 8601 specifies YYYY-MM-DD and that's that, at least for the Gregorian calendar. I don't know why people bother with other formats.
They do that with glues at my job. The code supposed to be used for quality control. Like first letter plant it was manufactured in and the second the month and so on. I think it dumb. Never seen it on food before.
Best sniffed before?