Rotation and FIFO

A store cupboard fails in one of two ways: you eat the new things and the old ones expire behind them, or you build something so elaborate to prevent that which you stop maintaining it after a month.

Three habits prevent both, and none of them is a spreadsheet.

Check the date at the shop, not at home

This is the highest-value habit on the page and almost nobody does it. Tins of the same product on the same shelf routinely differ by a year or more in best before date, because stock gets layered as it is replenished.

Reaching to the back of the supermarket shelf costs you three seconds and buys you months. If you are stocking up properly, it is worth doing deliberately.

Newest to the back

When you get home, new stock goes behind what is already there. That is the whole of FIFO — first in, first out — and it works because it makes the correct behaviour the lazy one. You reach for the front, and the front is always the oldest.

The version that fails is putting shopping away in whatever order it comes out of the bag, then intending to eat the old stuff first. Intention is not a system.

Make it visible

You will not rotate what you cannot see. A deep cupboard where tins are two rows back is where food goes to expire quietly.

What actually helps:

• One layer deep wherever possible. Wide and shallow beats deep.
• Labels facing out, which sounds fussy and takes no extra time while you are already putting things away.
• Decant dried goods into containers you can see into — and decanting keeps them dry, which matters more than tidiness. Damp is what leaves old pulses refusing to soften however long you cook them, as the rehydration page explains.

Best before is not use by

Worth being precise, because this is where most food gets thrown away unnecessarily.

Best before is a quality date. Food may legally be sold after it, and a tin of tomatoes a few months past is a question about flavour, not safety.

Use by is a safety date, and supplying food after one is an offence. It appears on things that go off in a way that can hurt you — which is mostly not what lives in this cupboard.

None of that overrides physical checks. A tin that is dented on a seam, bulging or rusted goes in the bin whatever the date says, and a tin well inside its date with a deep seam dent is still a tin with a deep seam dent.

The once-a-season look

Twice a year, take everything out. Not to audit it — to see it. Put back what is good, oldest at the front, and cook the three things you had forgotten you owned.

That last part is the actual point. A rotation habit that never changes what you cook is just tidying.