No more expiry dates on stickers


There’s some good news at last. It is because of this reason that we stopped going to one of the big malls in Doha. One weekend about four months ago, we went out for shopping and when we wanted to buy some bread and chapatis, we saw two stickers of expiry date on the same product. When we removed the upper sticker which said the bread had four more days to expire, the sticker below said that it was going to expire the day we were buying it :( Then, the same was found on the packets of chapatis and we didn’t buy them, realizing how a big mall like that can cheat consumers, and that too in a place like Doha!

That incident made us not only to stop visiting that mall, but also to check each and every product for its expiry date at other malls as well.

Now, I read a report in the newspaper that the authorities have asked the traders and importers of food items to print the expiry date of such products directly on the packets, and not on the stickers. The move is intended to prevent any manipulation by the traders in the expiry dates.

We have to laud the efforts of the Joint Food Monitoring Committee at the Supreme Council of Health (SCH) which has decided to issue a circular to all traders and importers in this regard.