Your groceries are about to make one tiny change that could help you waste a lot less food. Fortune reports that new guidelines for grocery stores and product manufacturers might do away with the "sell by" date on products you use every day.

Right now, you can see one or more of the following dates on a package: Sell By, Use By, Expires On, Best Before, Better If Used By, Best By, and more. What does any of that actually mean, anyway? The Food Marketing Institute and the Grocery Manufacturers Association released new voluntary guidelines to help consumers understand exactly when they need to throw away their food.

According to their new policy, products should only have one of two types of dates: "BEST If Used By" or "USE By." If it's "Best If Used By," that date just means the product might not taste as good or be as useful past a certain date, but it's still safe to use and/or eat. If the product says "USE By," that means you have to consume the products by that date, and throw it away after, for health and safety reasons.

The program is voluntary, but the groups urge stores and products to get on board by the summer of 2018. They hope companies listen, because doing so could drastically cut back on wasted food. After all, if you think every "sell by" date is actually an expiration date, you're likely throwing out perfectly good food before it has gone bad. And nonprofit grocery stores have made a business out of selling goods that are slightly past their use-by dates, because they're still perfectly good. So if it's easier for everyone to figure out when their food is okay to eat, that means a lot less food sitting in landfills—and that's good for everyone.

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