The simple tip could help you pick out the freshest produce (Image: Getty)
Picking up a selection of fresh and during your weekly shop is essential for a healthy and balanced .
They’re ideal for snacking or incorporating into meals, but depending on where you’re buying from, fresh produce can go bad pretty quickly.
And many supermarkets, in a bid to reduce food waste, have scrapped ‘best-before’ dates on their products and urged customers to use their initiative instead.
While this is effective most of the time, it can still be hard to know how to pick the freshest fruit and vegetables from the shop, that’ll see you through the week.
According to the experts at Which?, there’s actually a way to tell – and it’s in the form of secret codes that supermarkets ‘don’t want you to know’.
You can get the ‘freshest’ fruit and veg by taking a closer look at the packaging (Image: Getty)
Taking to , the experts made a short video detailing exactly what to look out for on those supermarket labels, in order to snag the freshest produce on the shelves.
Now that supermarkets don’t tend to print use-by dates on the fruit and veg, instead you should look out for a ‘letter and number’ when you’re shopping at Asda and Tesco.
They use letters A-L for each month of the year, and the number is the date.
So for instance, if a bag of potatoes had B27 printed on it, the best before date would be February 27.
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If you’re shopping at Sainsbury’s, the process is ‘a bit trickier’.
The expert said: “Their codes start and end with J and S, which stands for J Sainsbury PLC, the official name of the company. But in between, there’s some numbers representing the date and month.”
For example, 2702 would signal a use-by date of February 27. Marks & Spencer also does something similar, with the date and month sandwiched in between a 1J and C1 on the label.
At Aldi, it’s even more complicated. On the label, you’ll see four numbers – the first two represent the week of the year, and the last two represent the day of the week.
The advice from the experts is to grab two of the same products and compare the labels. The higher the numbers, the more shelf life you’ll get.
But at Morrisons it’s easy to tell – they simply print the first letter of the month, and the date.