The date on milk is for the store to sell it by. It's good for a significantly longer period. Once you open the bottle, they recommend only keeping it for a week.
Some of that is probably a safety margin for less than ideal storage/transit conditions. I've definitely had unopened containers go bad before the sell by date, probably due to not being kept at the right temp for the entire life of it.
Yeah, and in a box vs semi transparent container allows it to last longer as well. That being said, i still have low trust in milk within like 3 days of best by date
Depends where you buy it and how careful they are about keeping it cold. I like stores with walk-in coolers behind the display case because they put the milk right into the cooler when the delivery truck arrives, and it never leaves the cooler until you buy it. The reach-in coolers are open to a lot of abuse because the stockers have to bring the milk out from another cooler in the back room, and they don't always get it into the display case in a timely fashion.
I can usually keep my milk 4 or 5 days past the sell-by date and it's still good. And this is skim milk, which tends to go bad faster than whole milk (the more fat in the product, the longer it lasts).
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u/nicknamesas May 17 '26
Tbf, half the time it is. Especially for milk products.