Claim:

Al Capone advocated for the introduction of best-before dates on food and eventually helped to introduce them after his sister became ill from consuming spoiled milk.

Evaluation:

Claims that the enforcement of best-before dates on food was thanks to the gangster Al Capone and that they were ultimately introduced have been circulating for years on social media platforms and online news portals – from TikTok and Facebook to Vice and the BBC.

One example was shared on Reddit in May 2024 and had more than 31,000 upvotes at the time of writing:

Aside from anecdotal evidence, Snopes could find no evidence to support this claim. We do know that most major food labeling regulations were introduced in the decades following Capone’s death in 1947. However, aside from infant formula, there are no regulations in the U.S. regarding expiration date labeling. All such labeling is done voluntarily by food manufacturers.

For these reasons, we have classified the claim as “unproven.”

We’ve contacted the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service, which oversees shelf-life regulations, for more information about the origins of the program. We’ll update this article if we receive a response.

In the meantime, here’s what we know about this rumor:

There are two reasons why Capone allegedly lobbied for expiration dates.

One of them, as seen in the Reddit post above, suggests that he had advocated for clearly printed expiration dates on milk bottles after a relative – according to some accounts, his sister – became ill from drinking spoiled milk.

The second version of the rumor is less altruistic: Capone allegedly controlled the equipment used to label alcohol bottles during Prohibition, and when expiration dates became the norm, he was able to profit from the regulations.

But as the BBC reported, none of these stories could be proven to be “100% fact.” As Vice noted, the story is “an interesting footnote in the battle to ensure food quality through best-before dates.”

The story appears to have its origins in the 2010 book Uncle Al Capone: The Untold Story of His Family, written by his great-niece Deirdre Marie Capone. On page 43, she describes the gangster’s alleged involvement in the introduction of expiration dates:

Al turned his business eye to less conspicuous businesses – and came across the dairy industry. As he himself put it: “You have to have a product that everyone needs every day. We don’t have it in terms of alcohol. Apart from the drunkards, most people only buy a couple of bottles of gin or scotch when they have a party. The working man drinks half a dozen bottles of beer on Saturday night and that’s it for the week.”

But with milk! Every family wants it on the table every day… Do you realize that the price of fresh milk is higher than that of alcohol? To be honest, we have been falling into the wrong trap all this time.”

Al and Ralph already had access to bottling plants for their bootlegging business, so it wasn’t difficult for them to add milk to their product line. My grandfather Ralph is credited with being the first person to date-stamp milk bottles. Although most people think he got his nickname “Bottles” from his bootlegging work, it actually came from his clever idea of ​​printing the date on milk bottles so people at the grocery store would know how fresh the product was.

But sales of milk and other soft drinks never took off like alcohol sales, and Al wasn’t willing to trade his luxury lifestyle for the quieter life of a milkman.

With the exception of infant formula, according to the Federal Food Safety and Inspection Service, dating products is not required by federal regulations. The service simply provides guidelines on dating. Food manufacturers voluntarily provide these dates, which may also be referred to as “sell by” and “use by” dates, to describe the dates for best quality. (Just because a food is past the date printed on the package doesn’t mean it has gone bad.)

According to FSIS, manufacturers establish quality criteria based on the length of time and temperature at which a product is stored during distribution and offered for sale, as well as the type of food and packaging.

There are several important laws that influenced food labeling, but most of them occurred decades after Capone’s death in 1947. According to a 2010 report from the U.S. Institute of Medicine, until the late 1960s, “there was little information on food labels indicating the nutritional content of the food.”

• The Fair Packaging and Labeling Act was enacted in 1967. It mandates the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration to issue regulations requiring that all “consumer products” be labeled with certain characteristics, such as net content.
• In 1990, lawmakers passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which gave the FDA the authority to set uniform nutrition labeling standards for most foods.
• The Food Date Labeling Act of 2023 establishes requirements for the format of quality and expiration date labels on food labels.

For more information on the history of expiration dates specifically for milk, Snopes has contacted the Dairy Farmers of America. We will update this article if we receive a response.

Sources