A supplement carries a best-before date, not a use-by date. Under UK food labelling rules the two are different things: a use-by date is a safety date, applied only to foods that are highly perishable from a microbiological point of view, while a best-before date is a quality date. A dry tablet in a sealed blister is not a highly perishable food, so it gets the quality date - formally, a date of minimum durability.
What that date declares is that up to that point, stored in the conditions printed beside it, the product still meets the specification it was released against. The storage line is part of the claim rather than a footnote to it, and the date only becomes checkable when it is read together with the batch code: the date says when, the code says what.
There is a date printed on the carton of every AllMaleUp pack. It is a best-before date. In British food law that phrase is not a softer way of saying the same thing as the date on a chicken breast - it is one of two specific date types, and the other one carries a completely different meaning.
Almost nobody is taught the difference. It is worth ten minutes, because it is the difference between a statement about quality and a statement about safety, and only one of them is ever printed on a supplement.
Do supplements expire, or is that date something else?
Government guidance on food labelling puts it in a single line: use-by dates relate to the safety of food, whereas best-before dates relate to quality. Two dates, two jobs. A pack carries one or the other, never both.
Which one a food gets is decided by the food, not by the brand. The rule sits in the retained food information regulation and it is narrow. Where a food is highly perishable from a microbiological point of view, and is therefore likely after a short period to constitute an immediate danger to human health, the date of minimum durability is replaced by a use-by date. That is the whole test. Fresh meat, fresh dairy, prepared salad - the foods that grow something if you leave them alone.
A dry pressed tablet sealed in a blister is not that kind of food. So it carries the default: a date of minimum durability, printed as 'best before' where a day is given, or 'best before end' where the date is a month and a year.
What 'date of minimum durability' actually declares
The legal name for it is worth holding on to, because the name says what the date is. Durability, not safety. Minimum, not exact.
What a manufacturer declares with that date is narrower than most people assume, and more useful. It is this: up to this date, stored in the stated conditions, the product still meets the specification it was released against. The declared weight of each ingredient. The identity of each plant. The physical properties of the tablet - weight, hardness, moisture. The results filed against that production run.
What the date does not declare is a moment when something changes. Nothing switches over at midnight. The date marks the end of the window the manufacturer is prepared to stand behind, which is a statement about the evidence they hold, not a verdict on the tablet in your hand. What anyone does with a pack after that date is their own decision. If you have a question about your own health, the person to ask is a pharmacist or your GP. A carton cannot answer it, and neither can we.
Why do storage conditions change what the date means?
A best-before date is conditional, and the condition is printed next to it. The regulation is explicit about this. Where it is needed, the date has to be followed by a description of the storage conditions which must be observed if the product is to keep for the specified period. Separately, any food requiring special storage conditions has to state them, along with any instructions for after the pack is opened.
Why 'below 25 °C, dry, out of sunlight' is part of the date
So the date and the storage line are one sentence with a full stop dropped in the middle of it. The real claim is not 'best before end March'. It is 'best before end March, if you keep it cool, dry and out of the sun'. Read on its own, the date promises more than it was ever built to promise.
Ours reads: store cool and dry, below 25 °C, out of direct sunlight. That is not house style or hedging. Temperature, humidity and light are the three variables that formal stability testing is designed around, which is precisely why they are the three named on the pack. Change them and you have changed the conditions the date was calculated under, and nobody has recalculated it for you.
In practice that rules out most of the places people actually keep supplements. A bathroom shelf is warm and humid twice a day. A kitchen windowsill is a light box. A car glovebox in July is neither cool nor dry nor dark. A closed cupboard away from the hob is dull, and correct.
Packaging carries part of the same load. A blister seals each tablet away from air and moisture until the moment it is pushed out, which is a different exposure profile from a bottle that is opened and closed sixty times. That is one of the reasons we blister-pack rather than bottle, and it is worth knowing which format you have bought before you decide where to keep it.
What actually changes in a herbal tablet over time?
This is the part that is genuinely different for a botanical, and the part almost nothing written about supplement dates bothers to explain.
A milled plant powder pressed into a dry tablet is not a food that spoils in the way a fresh food spoils. The realistic question is not whether something has grown in it. It is whether the material inside still matches the description that was tested and filed when the batch was released.
Markers: how a shelf life is set for plant material
Plant material is a mixture, not a compound. A gram of ginseng root is hundreds of different chemicals in proportions set by where it grew, when it was lifted and how it was dried. The European regulator's own reflection paper on the stability of herbal products states the position plainly: many herbal substances and herbal preparations are known to be unstable. That is a technical observation about plant chemistry, not a warning.
Because the mixture cannot be tracked chemical by chemical, stability is followed using markers - defined constituents chosen because they can be measured reliably - together with chromatographic fingerprints of the whole material. A shelf life for a botanical is set by watching those markers over time under controlled conditions and deciding how far they are allowed to move before the material no longer counts as the same material.
That framework belongs to licensed herbal medicines, which are a separate legal category with their own approvals. A food supplement is not one, and we make no medicinal claim of any kind. But the plants are the same plants and the analytical problem is identical: what gets measured is a marker, and over months in a warm room the marker drifts.
Which is why a milligram figure on a label is a declaration about what went into the tablet, not a guarantee of unchanging chemistry for ever. Our pack declares Ginseng 25 mg, Maca 25 mg, Tribulus 20 mg, Guarana 10 mg, Ashwagandha 10 mg and Catuaba 10 mg - a hundred milligrams of plant material, every milligram disclosed. Those are the weights that were pressed. The date is the period over which the manufacturer stands behind that description, under the stated conditions.
How does the best-before date relate to the batch code?
Two short lines are printed on the carton after it leaves the artwork stage: a date and a code. They are printed at the same moment, in the same ink, because they are two halves of one record. On their own, each is nearly useless.
Why neither the date nor the code works on its own
The date is a point in time with no object attached. The code is an object with no time attached. Put them together and you have a specific set of tablets, made in a specific run, with a specific window declared against it - and that combination is the only thing that lets anybody check anything.
You can see this most clearly in the paperwork. A Certificate of Analysis is issued for one batch and reports what was found on the day that batch was tested. It is a snapshot, not a standing statement. That is a feature, not a limitation: a certificate that claimed to describe every pack the brand has ever made would be describing nothing. The batch code is what makes the certificate refer to your pack rather than to a brochure, which is the whole argument for printing batch numbers at all.
So the honest version is this. The certificate tells you what the material was at release. The date tells you how long that description is being stood behind. The storage line tells you under what conditions. Remove any one of the three and the other two stop meaning very much.
If you want ours, take the code from your carton, email it to hello@maleup.co.uk, and we send the certificate for that batch. Not a sample certificate. The one filed against the run your tablets came from.
We are not going to print a shelf life in an article, because the only date that governs your pack is the one printed on your pack. Articles get out of date. Cartons do not, which is rather the point of printing it on the carton.
None of this is exciting, and none of it tells you what six plants will or will not do - none of the six holds an authorised health claim in Great Britain, and we make none. A date is a piece of bookkeeping about a specification. But it is the piece that tells you whether the rest of the back of the pack is still describing what is actually inside, which is the only reason to read the back of a pack at all.
- 'Use by' is a safety date; 'best before' is a quality date. Supplements carry 'best before'.
- The legal term is date of minimum durability - durability, not safety; minimum, not exact.
- The stated storage conditions are part of the date, not a separate suggestion.
- For a botanical the issue is content drift against measured markers, not spoilage.
- A Certificate of Analysis reports one batch on one date, which is why the code and the date belong together.
Common questions
Do supplements expire?
Not in the way the word 'expire' suggests. Supplements sold in the UK carry a best-before date, which is a quality date, rather than a use-by date, which is a safety date reserved for foods that are highly perishable from a microbiological point of view. The formal term for a best-before date is the date of minimum durability. It marks the end of the period the manufacturer declares the product will still meet its specification when stored as instructed.
What is the difference between 'best before' and 'use by'?
Government guidance states that use-by dates relate to the safety of food, whereas best-before dates relate to quality. A use-by date is required where a food is highly perishable and likely, after a short period, to constitute an immediate danger to human health. Everything else carries a date of minimum durability, shown as 'best before' with a day or 'best before end' with a month and year.
Is it safe to take a supplement after its best-before date?
That is a question about your own health rather than about labelling, so the right people to ask are a pharmacist or your GP. What we can tell you is what the date means: after it, the manufacturer is no longer declaring that the product meets the specification it was released against. The decision about what to do with a pack past its date is yours to make.
Does storage really affect the best-before date?
Yes, and the rules treat the two as one statement. Where storage conditions matter, the labelling regulation requires the date to be followed by the conditions that must be observed if the product is to keep for the stated period, and any food needing special storage has to say so. Our pack states cool and dry, below 25 °C, out of direct sunlight. Kept outside those conditions, the date was calculated for a situation that no longer applies.
What changes in a herbal supplement over time?
Plant material is a mixture of many constituents rather than a single compound, and the regulator's own reflection paper on herbal stability notes that many herbal substances and preparations are known to be unstable. Stability is therefore followed using defined marker constituents and chromatographic fingerprints. The practical question for a dry tablet is not spoilage but whether the material still matches the description that was tested when the batch was released.
How do I check the date and batch on my pack?
Look for the two short lines printed on the carton after the artwork: a date and a code. The date is the best-before. The code identifies the production run. Email the code to hello@maleup.co.uk and we send the Certificate of Analysis filed against that batch, which reports what was found when that run was tested.
- Understanding food labelling: best before and use-by dates — GOV.UK "Use-by dates relate to the safety of food, whereas best before dates relate to quality."
- Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, Article 24 - date of minimum durability, use by date — legislation.gov.uk (assimilated law, Great Britain) Use-by replaces the date of minimum durability only for foods highly perishable from a microbiological point of view.
- Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, Annex X - date of minimum durability — legislation.gov.uk (assimilated law, Great Britain) 'Best before' / 'best before end' wording, and the requirement to state the storage conditions that must be observed if the product is to keep for the specified period.
- Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, Article 25 - storage conditions or conditions of use — legislation.gov.uk (assimilated law, Great Britain)
- Reflection paper on stability testing of herbal medicinal products and traditional herbal medicinal products (EMA/HMPC/3626/2009) — Committee on Herbal Medicinal Products, European Medicines Agency "Many herbal substances/herbal preparations are known to be unstable"; defines markers used to follow stability. Applies to licensed herbal medicines, a separate legal category from food supplements.
- The Food (Lot Marking) Regulations 1996 — legislation.gov.uk Lot marking requirement that puts a code alongside the date on prepacked food.
Six botanicals, 100 mg per tablet, every weight printed on the carton: Ginseng 25 mg, Maca 25 mg, Tribulus 20 mg, Guarana 10 mg, Ashwagandha 10 mg, Catuaba 10 mg. Maximum one tablet in any 24-hour period. Pressed in the UK on a GMP-registered line.
See the packs →† Describes the traditional use of these botanicals (UK 'on-hold' botanical claims under retained Regulation (EC) 1924/2006). Not authorised EFSA health claims. AllMaleUp is a food supplement, not a medicine.