Muir Glen Tomato Product Expiration Dates

[austingirl]

I know a lot of us are buying quite a number of Muir Glen tomato products, so I thought this might be of use to someone....

The Muir Glen cans don't have expiration dates on them.
I noticed when I was trying to arrange my small but growing stockpile last night. So this morning I called them, and the CSR explained how to decipher the manufacturing codes to arrive at the date of manufacture, and then the expiration date. Here's the sescret decoder ring:

On one end of the can, there are two rows of numbers & letters. The first section of the bottom row contains the date. The first character represents the month - A=January, B=February, etc... The second character is the year - 6 = 2006. The last two characters of that series is the day of the month.

So, my diced tomatoes
have the following code:
001BR 3
H6KX25 1125

the H6KX25 is the part that holds the date.
H= August (H is 8th letter in alphabet, Aug is 8th month)
6 = 2006
skip to the last two numbers...
25 = the 25th
My tomatoes were canned on Aug 25th, 2006.

The Diced tomatoes, tomato paste, and tomato sauce have a shelf life of 930 days. This is approximately 30 months. So, an approximate expiration date for this can is February 25th, 2009. If you do the math, they are actually good for 2 weeks for than that - the exact expiry date is 3/12/09.

The company is going to mail me a page that explains this (probably much better than I have here!). I'll post it when I receive it.

[Ginya]

Thanks, repped you. Why do they have to make it so complicated?

[Little Birdie]

I've just been planning my shopping trips and organizing my coupons. Even though I haven't bought a single can yet, I know I'm going to have a large stockpile.

I love that I have the secret decoder ring before I even had a chance to get agravated!!

[XUfan]

Thanks for the info! I still have 4 cans left from last year's Muir Glen party! All four of them are good for almost a year. But...at the rate we eat tomatoes, they'll be gone by next week!

[jenjacobs]

Why don't they make it easier on everyone and do normal expirations dates??? I mean really. Think about the people stocking shelves at stores, that would be a pain to sit there and figure out.

[austingirl]

Originally Posted by jenjacobs Why don't they make it easier on everyone and do normal expirations dates??? I mean really. Think about the people stocking shelves at stores, that would be a pain to sit there and figure out.

Their date-code convention is actually pretty common in manufacturing settings (just one of the thousands of useless facts I've acquired through my job), but I agree it's weird for end-user consumer products.

Where are you getting the great Muir Glen deals? HEB or Randalls?

Repped ya for the great info!

[lifeskills13]

Im Bumping this thread up because i searched all over the internet for this info ..and what ya know the last chance i took to search brought up this. I know a lot of other people would like to know!
I have a lot of these cans and i decided to donate a few and couldn't for the life of me figure out the expiration date :) now i know!!
reps to the OP

[m1948s]

I searched high and low for those last week when they were on sale at Krogers!
Today I seen they are with the spagetti sauce not with the canned tomatoes! ARGH
MichelleS

[austingirl]

On the new cans that I recently bought, it looks they've changed their can stamps to include normal, readable information ("best by xx/xx/xxxx"), but I've seen some cans in the store with the old way. Hopefully the old ones will work their way through the system soon so we can stop using secret decoder rings to figure out expiration dates!