Whatever happened to common sense? Far too many people just don't have any these days and seem to need to be told everything in order to function. Providing fresh/chilled food has been properly stored, exceeding a notional use by date by a couple of days does no harm whatsover. With dried and frozen foods, the margins are far higher as you'd expect and we've never paid any attention to sell by dates in these cases. With high risk foods, of course, if I were in any real doubt I wouldn't take a chance if something looked/smelt bad or the packaging was damaged in some way but the sad fact is that a lot of people just bin anything that exceeds that little date on the label regardless of what it is, how it's been stored and what it looks/smells like. Not all that long ago I found a large , long forgotten tin of dried mashed potato lurking on a shelf in our garage/storeroom. It was 11 years old and about 8 years out of date but just out of interest I opened it and tried it. There was nothing wrong with it at all (except that it was dried mash of course...
)