Uncover the 'shadow' of the shelf life of food coding

When buying goods, people care most about the shelf life on the packaging. However, little-known information, including many famous brand foods, can be altered with simple means such as shelf life and other information. Some merchants borrowed printing machinery, toxic chemicals and other props to alter the shelf life of foods like a trick. Relevant experts called for special rectification of the unspoken rules of the food industry, combining civil air defense and technical defense, so that consumers understand. The expiration date is easy to change. A medium-sized food company altered the packaging production date without authorization. Use a cotton swab dipped in thinner to lightly smear the production date, product batch number, etc. on various big-brand food packaging with different fonts. A few seconds witnessed a miracle. Plastic bags, aluminum cans or cartons, the production date, etc. are basically smeared! Regardless of whether it is printing or spraying, as long as ink is used, it can be altered. A coding equipment supplier stated that the printing time information can be adjusted arbitrarily within 3 years! Consumers are kept in the dark by unspoken rules, and local food regulatory authorities often remind consumers that they can defend their rights by checking whether the production date is blurred and whether there are ink marks around the printing date and the color is dark. Some people in the industry admitted that these identification techniques have basically failed with the upgrading of alteration methods. Many people, from large companies to small vendors, know the issue of altering the shelf life of food. A well-known packaging machinery manufacturer in Beijing revealed that at present, a more effective countermeasure is to use a laser printer to laser burn the production date and other information on the outer packaging. However, many manufacturers in the laser machine food industry stay away. The main reason is that the price of gold production is high, the price is about twice that of the ink equipment. Some large companies in the food industry adopt an internal risk attitude towards altering dates: special codes are added to the coding information such as production dates, and one code corresponds to only one batch of products. In this way, when the product date is altered and there is a quality dispute, the company will provide evidence to seek exemption. However, consumers are still kept in the dark and become the biggest victims when companies seek to be independent. Preventing food from never expiring requires both symptoms and root causes. At present, the problem of distortion of the shelf life of food is becoming one of the most prominent hidden dangers of food safety. Relevant experts called on the regulatory authorities to urgently need to take measures that combine technology and air defense to contain them. Only with the supervision of the whole society, there is nowhere to hide all kinds of ‘damaging moves’.