How to Decode Peanut Butter Freshness Dates

Peanut butter, as with most other foods, has a defined period of time set forth by the manufacturer for product freshness and edibility. Most peanut butters on the market are usable for 18 months to two years from the time of being placed into the jar and, by law, the expiration date must be printed on each bottle before being sold. The expiration date isn't always intuitive to read since companies also add batch and plant numbers near the date.

Instructions

• 1

  Look for an actual date format on the jar before continuing with the other options below. Date formats are generally found in 2-digit sequences in one of the following formats: MM/DD/YY, MM-DD-YY, MMDDYY. Where MM is a two-digit month, DD is a two-digit day, and YY is a two-digit year. For the month, 01 stands for January, 02 for February, 03 for March, and continues until 12 which is the 12th month of the year, being December. Days are numbered 01 to 30 or 31, and the years have the last two digits printed: 99 for 1999, 00 for the year 2000, 10 for the year 2010, etc.

• 2

  Decode based upon manufacturer information if the date is encoded in a way that Step 1 above is irrelevant. For Jif peanut butter, the code is an eight-digit sequence. The first number is the year the product was made. If the first digit is 1, for example, the product was made in 2001. For the years following 2010, there will be two digits: 10 for 2010, 11 for 2011, etc. The following three digits are the day of the year it was made. There are 365 days in a year, so to find the exact date, count from January 1 to the day these three digits represent for that year.

• 3

  Call the customer service number located on the jar label in the event neither of the above dating methods are used on the product you desire to purchase. This is typically a toll-free telephone number to the company. With so many brands of peanut butter available, made by different companies, some expiration dates may be embedded along with batch code, plant number, lot number and other coding. In this case, the company will instruct you on how to decipher the code on its product.