I bought Meadow Gold ice cream sandwiches recently and noticed a 30-cent coupon on the box had a Dec. 31, 1995, expiration! I looked for an expiration date for the ice cream and couldn't find one. Aren't they supposed to put such dates on food items? Expired coupon on box
didn’t mean food was oldThere is no federal or state law that requires expiration or pull dates for food in Hawaii, except for milk (a state requirement) and infant formulas (a federal requirement), said Maurice Tamura, chief of the state Food and Drug Branch.
But Ron Sugai, Meadow Gold's director of domestic and international relations, assures that "there's nothing wrong with the product. It's not an old product."
What is old is the packaging for the Mississippi Mud Chocolate ice cream sandwich, he said. Meadow Gold, which gets its packaging from the mainland, is getting new containers this year.
"We have sent out letters to retailers to honor the coupons," Sugai said, so don't toss them out.
Meanwhile, Tamura says consumers shouldn't rely on expiration dates as a guarantee of food quality anyway.
"At best, they are merely guidelines because food quality depends on many things," he said, such as how the food was handled, whether it needs refrigeration and, if so, whether that refrigeration was adequate.
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