Key insights
- Don’t pay attention to the color of the label where the bread was baked. Every bakery has its own system.
- Contact your favorite bread manufacturer and ask them what the labels mean.
- Find out whether the date on the label was the day the bread was baked or the expiration date.
If you buy a lot of bread, your kitchen drawer probably looks a little like mine: littered with colorful plastic labels that once held loaves of yesteryear. These bread tags – also called bread tabs, bread ties, bread clips or bread buckles – are typically a square with a hole on one side that is used to keep the bread bag closed. Some have dates, prices or indecipherable numerical codes printed on them, while others are blank.
What do these labels tell us about the bread they accompany? After an extensive internet search full of conflicting information, I discovered some useful tips that might help you choose the freshest bread at your grocery store. (Spoiler: you’ll have to do a little research yourself!)
What the bread tags do NOT mean
Let’s start by debunking the often-held notion that the color of bread labels indicates what day of the week the bread was baked. A blue sign for bread baked on Monday, a green sign for Tuesday, a red sign for Wednesday, and so on. An example of this color coding can be found here Snopesa private fact-checking website.
As Snopes reports, this color-coding system is supposedly designed to help grocery store employees easily identify which breads have been sitting on the shelves too long and need to be swapped out and replaced with fresher bread. Unfortunately it’s not that simple.
This color coding is not an industry standard and is not regulated. Every bakery has its labeling system, which may or may not correspond to the days of the week shown in this table. It also assumes that bakeries deliver five days a week – most don’t. For this reason, there is no guarantee that you will find the freshest bread using this coding system.
Here’s how to find out what the colored tags mean
Luckily, with a little research, there Is a way for you to decipher the meaning of these tags. First, you can talk to an employee at your local grocery store to learn how they store bread. Many stores change their inventory every two to three days so that the baked goods are always fresh.
However, since each bread brand uses its own labeling system, it’s likely that the employee won’t be able to tell you which bread is the freshest simply by looking at the bread labels.
The true, foolproof way to find out what the different colored tags mean is to go straight to the source. Call the company you buy bread from – the phone number is usually right on the bag or on the website – and ask what the bread labels say.
Afterwards, I learned that my favorite bread brand only uses white labels and every label has an expiration date on it. I thought it was the date the bread was baked! And so I found out that I always buy bread the day it expires. With this new information, I went straight to the kitchen to slice and freeze my bread before it went stale. The more you know, the more you reduce food waste and save money!
