Check the Label for Expired Candy

Heather R. — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:15:30 +0000

The Consumerist had a great article yesterday on how to determine if M&M’s, Mars or Hershey candy is expired:

“For M&Ms and Mars candy, there’s usually a 10 digit code of numbers and letters, but you only need to worry about the first three. The first number is the last number in the year (8 means 2008, 7 means 2007, etc) and the next two numbers stand for the week of the year (so, a number like 804 would be the fourth week of 2008: February 2008).

“For Hershey’s candy, there’s a 2 character code for the month and year. The year is like the other code, with the number being the last number in the year, the second character is a letter that represents the month. A = January, B = February, and so on. So a code like 9A would mean that the candy expires January of 2009.”

I grabbed a bag of M&M’s to check this out, and as you can see in the picture above this one apparently expired in December 2007, which is lame because I bought it in February 2008. But as several commenters in the original post pointed out, though, expired candy likely won’t make you sick, it’ll just taste off. I haven’t noticed anything funky about it so I think I’ll live!

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Check the Label for Expired Candy