Dating it honestly
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Establish it, do not copy it
The date on a competitor’s product reflects their process, their packaging and their distribution. Yours has to come from holding your product and tasting it, which means a small ongoing program of retained units rather than a single trial at the start.
Hold the trial at a realistic temperature
Not at your coldest shelf. Retail cabinets run warmer than production cold rooms, home fridges run warmer still, and a product spends time in a bag on the way. A date established under ideal conditions is a date that fails under ordinary ones.
Decide what the date means
A quality date and a safety date are different claims, and for a refrigerated product buyers read any date as the second one whether you meant it that way or not. Be clear in your own records which you are making, because it decides what you do when stock approaches it.
Taste at the date, not before it
The useful test is the product at the end of its claimed life, stored realistically, which means the trial takes as long as the shelf life. There is no way to shorten that, and makers who skip it are printing a guess.
Never extend a date to reduce waste
It is the one change that turns an inventory problem into a safety one. If the date causes too much loss, the answer is smaller batches, better forecasting or a different route to market.
Open date or coded date, decided deliberately
An open date a customer can read is what retail expects. A code only you can interpret is useful internally and reads as evasive on a consumer product. Most products carry both, and the internal code is what makes traceability work when a complaint arrives.