China-Singapore Jingwei, March 22 (Xue Yufei) Have you ever played such a game with your family: look at the goods over and over again to see who can find the production date!
With the increasing concern about food safety, it has become a habit for many people to check information such as production date and expiration date when purchasing goods. However, some consumers have reported that the production date of some goods is "hide and seek", and it is difficult to find it without careful search.
There are various printing positions, small characters and light colors
Recently, Zhongxin Jingwei came to a Yonghui supermarket near Changying, Chaoyang District, Beijing. In just over an hour, I looked at the location of the printed production dates for various types of goods.
There are a variety of printing positions for the production date. Photo by Xue Yufei
"There are all kinds of marked locations", which is the reporter's first feeling. There is no unified standard for the position of the production date on the packaging of various commodities, which is printed on the front of the commodity packaging, as well as on the back and side, and is printed in the middle of the commodity and hidden in the corners. Due to the uncertainty of the printing location, finding the production date of the product requires repeated searches.
The production date printed on the front of the product packaging is relatively easy to see, but a large number of products have the production date printed on the plastic seal or the side of the package, plus the font is blurred, and it is easy to ignore it without careful inspection. Some products have the production date printed on the edge of the plastic packaging, and the edge is easy to fold and the production date is even more difficult to spot.
The printing position of the production date of the same product is also different. Photo by Xue Yufei
Even if the same product is produced by the same manufacturer, the printing position of the production date may be different. For example, the production date of the same Yonghe soybean milk instant soybean powder on the supermarket shelf, one is printed on the front of the package, and the other is on the side.
The small and vague characters are another reason why the production date is difficult to find. During the visit, an elderly consumer said to Zhongxin Jingwei: "Some foods with a short shelf life have very small fonts on the production date, which is very unfriendly to the elderly, and I can't read it clearly." What should I do if I buy an expired product and eat it badly?"
For example, in a supermarket, a tofu silk product with a length of about 30 centimeters has its production date printed at the top of the package, and the font is small and white, which is not easy for consumers to notice.
Zhongxin Jingwei also found that the font color of the production date was generally white, black or gray, and almost none of them were printed in bright colors, which did not play a role in highlighting or prompting. The production date of a pet food bag with a predominantly white color printed on the edge of the package is not only small, but also gray in color, which is easy to overlook.
The date of manufacture on the packaging of the drug. Photo by Xue Yufei
In addition to food, the production date and expiration date of drugs are usually printed and stamped on the packaging box, although the stamping method makes the numbers not easy to fall off and blur, but it is also prone to the problem of incomplete digital display and poor sharpness.
The printing position is special, and the "stealth technique" is deliberately performed?
During the visit, the reporter found that some commodities, especially foods that need to be refrigerated, will print the production date in a special position on the packaging, resulting in the complete integration of the font and the packaging, which is difficult to read.
The production date is printed on the black-brown area of the bag. Photo by Xue Yufei
In the refrigerated cabinet of Yonghui Supermarket, a frozen food with pearl white shrimp with the trademark name "Yonghui Farm" (note: the trademark holding company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yonghui Supermarket) uses a white bag in the middle and a black-brown packaging bag on all sides. After careful identification, its production date was finally found in the black-brown area of the package, which is January 2024.
Why don't the above-mentioned products print the production date in the white area in the middle, but print it in the black-brown area? The production date and the color of the packaging bag are almost integrated, doesn't it increase the difficulty of consumers' identification? On the 21st, Zhongxin Jingwei asked the relevant people of Yonghui Supermarket whether there are internal regulations on the way to mark the production date of the product, but did not receive a reply as of press time.
The date of manufacture is printed in the blue area of the bag. Photo by Xue Yufei
Also in the freezer, it took several minutes to find the production date of a "deep-sea cod steak" product. The upper part of the product packaging bag is white, the lower part is blue, and the reporter picked up the product and searched carefully for it, but did not find the production date. After that, the reporter asked a male staff member of Yonghui Supermarket, and he said: "You have to look carefully, there must be a production date, but it is not easy to find, and many products are like this now." ”
Supermarket staff use mobile phone lights to look for production dates. Photo by Xue Yufei
The staff member then took the "deep-sea cod steak" in the reporter's hand, looked for a while but couldn't find it, and said, "This is a new product, and I'm not familiar with it." Later, he took out his mobile phone and turned on the light of his phone, and after a little search, he finally found the production date at the edge of the blue zone. The color of the production date font is very light, and the indoor lights reflect it, so it is not easy to see.
The date of manufacture of the chicken product is located in the plastic closure position. Photo by Xue Yufei
There are many more products that are "invisible" to the production date. For example, a soy sauce chicken product has the production date stamped on the position of the plastic seal, and the plastic seal has folds, which almost blends with the concave and convex feeling of the steel stamped numbers, a soybean milk powder, the packaging bag is mainly off-white, and only a few areas are green, despite this, the production date and shelf life of the product are printed in the green area, and a Menglong ice cream is printed on the brown area of the package.
The date of manufacture is hidden in the brown area of the package. Photo by Xue Yufei
In addition to this, discount promotions in supermarkets often use opaque tape to bundle several products together, and some of the products are obscured from their production dates and expiration dates. During the visit, some customers asked the promoter in the supermarket whether the yogurt sold at a discount was still within the expiration date, and only after receiving a positive reply from the promoter did the customer put the yogurt in the shopping cart.
What should I do with "conspicuous callouts"?
Article 71 of the Food Safety Law of the People's Republic of China stipulates that the labels and instructions of food and food additives shall be clear and obvious, and the production date, shelf life and other matters shall be conspicuously marked and easy to identify.
The General Principles for the Labeling of Prepackaged Foods formulated by the National Health Commission stipulate that the production date and shelf life of prepackaged foods should be clearly indicated. If the date is marked in the form of "see a certain part of the package", the specific part of the package should be indicated. The date indication shall not be additional, reprinted or tampered with. When the maximum surface area of pre-packaged food packaging or packaging containers is greater than 35 square centimeters, the height of the text, symbols and numbers of the mandatory labeling content shall not be less than 1.8 mm.
Zhu Danpeng, vice president of the Guangdong Provincial Food Safety and Security Promotion Association and food industry analyst, told Zhongxin Jingwei that the state has long had clear regulations on the labeling of production dates, but there are still some small and micro enterprises or low-energy cities in the market where the production date of commodity packaging is not clearly marked, which needs to be further standardized.
He suggested that in the face of enterprises knowingly committing crimes and playing "edge balls", the relevant standards should further refine the provisions on the "conspicuous marking" of the production date.
In response to issues such as the labeling of production dates, some deputies to the National People's Congress have also put forward relevant suggestions. In September 2023, the National Health Commission released the "Reply to Recommendation No. 3248 of the First Session of the 14th National People's Congress" released on the website of the National Health Commission, which stated that in order to gain an in-depth understanding of consumers' habits of reading food labels, the National Health Commission organized a survey on food label awareness, and the survey results showed that date labeling is one of the food label labeling contents that consumers are most concerned about. At present, the National Health Commission is organizing the revision of the "General Principles for the Labeling of Prepackaged Food". In order to better meet the needs of consumers to read food labels, the revised General Principles for the Labeling of Prepackaged Food further improve the requirements for the labeling of food dates, and it is proposed to require the labeling of production date and shelf life to be uniformly carried out in the order of year, month and day.
At that time, the National Health Commission also said that the font size of the production date proposed by the National People's Congress deputies will be determined according to the size of the package, the contrast between the font color and the background color, and the relatively uniform position requirements, etc., which will be further studied in the revision of the standard. (Sino-Singapore Jingwei APP)