Walk down any grocery aisle and you’ll find a mess of date phrases—”sell by,” “best by,” “use by,” “enjoy by,” “freshest before”—that mean different things, or nothing legally at all. Shoppers can’t tell which dates signal “this is unsafe” versus “this might taste slightly less perfect,” so they toss perfectly good food to be safe. California has decided to end the confusion. Starting July 1, 2026, Assembly Bill 660 standardizes how food date labels are worded and bans the most misleading phrase of all, “sell by,” from consumer-facing packaging. California is the first state in the country to do it.
If you sell packaged food into California—and given the size of that market, that’s most national brands—this is a packaging change with a hard date and real penalties. It is not optional copy; it dictates the exact words allowed on your label. Here is what AB 660 requires, what “sell by” being banned actually means, who’s exempt, and the steps to get your packaging compliant before the July deadline.
What AB 660 Requires
The core of the law is simple: if you choose to (or are required to) put a date on a food item, it has to use one of two standardized phrasings, and the phrasing depends on whether you’re communicating quality or safety. For a quality date—the point after which the product may not be at its best but is still safe—you must use “BEST if Used by” or “BEST if Used or Frozen by.” For a safety date—the point after which the food should not be eaten—you must use “USE by” or “USE or Freeze by.”
That quality-versus-safety split is the entire point of the reform. Today the same “best by” date might be read as a hard safety cutoff by one shopper and ignored by another, and the inconsistency drives an enormous amount of avoidable food waste. By forcing every brand into the same two-tier vocabulary, AB 660 makes the label mean one specific thing. Note the law governs how you word a date if you display one—so the first decision for each product is which category its date actually represents, because that determines which phrase is legal.
“Sell By” Is Out—With One Exception
The headline ban is on “sell by.” From July 1, 2026, you cannot sell a food item in California, manufactured on or after that date, that is labeled with the consumer-readable phrase “sell by.” The reasoning is that “sell by” was never meant for shoppers at all—it’s a stock-rotation instruction for retailers—yet consumers routinely treated it as an eat-by deadline and threw away food that was perfectly fine days or weeks later.
There is one practical carve-out: retailers and manufacturers can still use “sell by” information for internal stock rotation if it’s in a coded format that isn’t easily readable by consumers and doesn’t spell out the phrase “sell by.” In other words, the back-of-house logistics date can survive as a code; it just can’t appear as plain “SELL BY 07/15” on the consumer-facing label. That coded approach dovetails neatly with where on-pack data is heading anyway—2D barcodes that carry batch and date information for systems rather than shoppers, which we covered in how 2D barcodes are replacing the UPC by 2027. The machine-readable date is the future; the misleading human-readable one is what’s being retired.
Who’s Affected and the Fine Print
Because California is so large, AB 660 functions as a de facto national standard for many brands—it’s rarely economical to run a California-only label, so most national products will simply adopt the standardized terms everywhere. A few categories are exempt where other laws impose conflicting terms: infant formula, eggs and pasteurized in-shell eggs, beer and other malt beverages, wine, spirits, and shellfish. If you’re outside those niches, assume you’re in scope.
Two details shape your timeline and risk. First, the requirement attaches to products manufactured on or after July 1, 2026, which means inventory made before that date can sell through with its existing labels—you don’t have to pull stock, but you do need your production changeover ready by the cutoff. Second, the penalties are real: violations are misdemeanors carrying fines of up to $1,000 per violation, and the state can act against licenses or permits. This is the kind of US labeling compliance that sits alongside your federal obligations; if you’re mapping the broader picture, our 2026 FDA food-contact compliance checklist covers the material-safety side that runs in parallel to labeling.
What to Do to Your Packaging Before July
Turn the law into a packaging project with a short, ordered checklist. First, audit every SKU’s current date language—list what each product says now (“sell by,” “best by,” “enjoy by,” and so on) so you know the scope of changes. Second, for each product that carries a date, decide whether it’s a quality date or a safety date, because that single determination dictates whether you use “BEST if Used by” or “USE by.” Get this right per product; defaulting everything to one term is a compliance risk.
Third, update artwork and print plates for the new wording, and confirm your date-coding equipment (inkjet, laser) can print the longer standardized phrases legibly in the space available—”BEST if Used or Frozen by” is a lot of characters for a small pack. Fourth, plan the production changeover around the manufacture-date trigger so packs made on or after July 1 carry compliant labels, while sequencing through pre-July inventory. Fifth, keep an eye on the wider patchwork: other states are moving on date and on-pack transparency rules (Louisiana, for instance, has pushed QR-linked manufacturer information), and the same disciplined claim-and-label hygiene applies to your sustainability copy too, as we discussed in why packaging sustainability claims now need evidence. Handle date labels as part of a single, coordinated label-compliance pass rather than a one-off fix.
The Takeaway
AB 660 replaces a confusing tangle of date phrases with two clear ones—”BEST if Used by” for quality, “USE by” for safety—and bans consumer-facing “sell by” from July 1, 2026, with California leading the country. For brands selling there, which is most, it’s a mandatory packaging update on a fixed date: audit your current date language, classify each product’s date as quality or safety, revise artwork and coding before the manufacture-date cutoff, and use the coded-date carve-out for any internal rotation needs. Done early, it’s a clean artwork cycle. Left late, it’s a scramble against a misdemeanor-level penalty—so treat the standardized vocabulary as the new baseline and build it into your labels now.
At gqthpack.com we help food brands update packaging artwork and date coding to meet evolving US labeling rules like AB 660—legible, compliant, and ready before the deadline. Talk to our team about getting your labels and coding squared away ahead of July 2026.
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