A few days ago, my wife had to deal with a nasty tick bite by going to the doctor and having the bugger extracted by a professional. It’s still swollen and irritated, and she’s been put on a preventative lyme’s disease medicine.
So, after getting the anesthesia shot and being poked and prodded, she decided that while she was at CVS getting her medicine, that the evening warranted some chocolate.
Unfortunately, what should have been a comfort food, was not. She opened her chocolate bar and found it all covered with white splotches and just generally stale and nasty.
That sucks.
When she got home and mentioned it to me, I told her that I had recently read an article on how to tell, by the secret codes on the candy, how old it was and when it would expire.
J: That would have been really useful to know about 30 minutes ago. You send me all the bullshit links by email all the time, and you didn’t think that information about chocolate should have been high on your list?
Um… I can’t say that I disagree with her.. I mean, I did file it away to be blogged about on a later date, I just hadn’t gotten around to it….. until now….
So here is the article from the Consumerist
I work at a small-volume store in the midwest, and the other day my supervisor asked us to check all of the candy in the checkout lanes to see if it had expired. M&M Mars and Hershey brand candy both had different, indecipherable codes on the back which tell the expiration date. After calling the 1-800 number and finding out what the codes meant, we discovered that most of our candy stock was expired by a year or more. We even found candy that went bad from 2004. I figured I should share the codes, so people won’t buy expired candy, because it’s out there.
I dunno.. Do you make a cheat sheet and keep it in your wallet? Should you take the candy back and get a refund?
And this article: How to Tell If It’s Good Chocolate