How do you tell which pre-packed produce is freshest at Sainsbury's

dealyboy

I know best before dates have come up before and we have a couple of ongoing threads comparing supermarkets, but rather than distracting I thought perhaps a 'quick' thread would be best.

I buy all of my vegetables from Sainsbury's and apart from onions they are pre-packed. I try to pick the freshest but it is often difficult to tell. The veg comes in stacked totes and with those products with BB dates on, as in mushrooms, you can generally find fresher stock by looking in the totes underneath, but I am having difficulty with carrots, celery and leeks in particular.

I have been looking at the bag labels recently and thought that I'd found an indicator the 'Packaging Code'. I am looking at my bag of carrots now, this has a packaging code of J1804S which I took to be 18th April, so that with my simplistic logic I would find later dates underneath, but this is not so. The top tote had 'J1904S', the one underneath 'J1804S' and the bottom one 'J1604S', the two 'underneath' totes looked to have fresher produce, cooler and with some condensation. It's a similar pattern with celery and leeks, where the same code is employed, the 'older' dates are beneath the 'younger' dates.

We know that Sainsbury's are religious in rotating stock, especially in their produce and fresh areas. I am a confused dealyboy, can somebody unconfuse me?

PLRFD

Just a guess if they’re filling shelves the top totes would be freshest so would go at the back and the shorter dated stuff would be at the front so customers who just grab the first available get those ?

Auti

If you are looking for dates it is now the alphabet code -  A = January, B= February and so on  then it has a number next to it for the date. So in the picture it is D21 so April 21st best before date.

dealyboy

Thanks for the replies ...

@PLRFD ... Indeed ... food in jars, cans and frozen do not 'suffer' this rotation, understandably so as they have BB dates with a lead time of 2 years typically. In the case of fruit and veg, cheese, meats, coleslaw etc etc, bread, they seem to be religious about stock rotation when shelf stacking.

However I do suspect my 'Packaging Code' clue is a genuine indicator and that the replenishers are not bothering to rotate fresh produce because they don't use best before dates. In fact on a couple of occasions recently I have found a tote underneath the top mushroom tote (where they have BBs) which is 'older'.

@Auti ... that's useful and different. My 'Packaging Code' may appear only on the 'by Sainsbury's' products, which appears under the product name.

MrsStepford

'Fresh' food could have been stored in a temperature-controlled warehouse for a year, before being sold in a supermarket and consumers don't get readily understandable codes which tell us when the food was picked. Riverford picks some organic crops daily and some crops are picked completely and stored in cold stores.