how do you deal with no expiry dates?

[dinah]

i have been checking exprity dates on what we've been buying and then i've been writing the month and year on the product. it's been good for me to have to reallhy think about how much of a product we are going to use and how much we need.

i've noticed that some things don't seem to have expiry dates. things like shampoo, shaving cream, mostly HBA's. but there have been some food products that i haven't been able to find expiry dates on. or if i have been able to find best before dates sometimes i can't decipher what they are; they just seem to be a jumple of letters and numbers. in those cases i've been writing the purchase date (bought month/year).

but i would like my stockpile to be standardized. lol. i want to only have expires month/year so that there is no confusion!

what does everyone do?

[frugalfranny]

Most of my foods have a date....the others I don't worry so much about. Toothpaste 'usually' has a date at the crimped end....and it does 'act funny' when expired....BTDT!

The "jumble' of letters and numbers is a 'julian date' that many companies use..........google it to find out the formula for figuring it out.........even the month and year will help.

[Libby]

Hmm..the things w/o a date - usually you can tell when they go bad. Maybe try to use up those items first so all the items left in the stockpile will be uniform with expiry dates.

If it's food - if you can find a manufacturing code, call up the company's customer service and read that code to them and they can tell you when it expires - depending on each food item, it expires 'x' amount of months after production.

If its a Julian date like frugalfranny said you can try keying it in here to see what you get:

Julian Date Converter
Online Conversion - Julian Date Converter

For the items w/o dates you can mark the purchase date as you stated. Mark it with a P ie P-Jul07/11.

If its an item that you've found out the expiry, mark it with an E ie E-Sep23/12

HTH