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| - In late August 2024, multiple social media users resurfaced a claim that mobster Al Capone lobbied and was ultimately responsible for the introduction of expiration dates on food, particularly milk.
Numerous examples appeared on X in August and September, and another was posted on Facebook.
Such claims have circulated for years online and in news reports, from TikTok and Facebook to Vice and the BBC.
One example shared on Reddit in May 2024 had more than 31,000 upvotes as of this writing.
Aside from anecdotal evidence, there was no conclusive proof to corroborate this claim. Most major food labeling requirements occurred in the decades following Capone's death in 1947. However, aside from infant formula, there is no requirement to label expiration dates in the U.S. All such labeling is voluntarily done by food manufacturers.
For these reasons, we rated this claim as "Unproven."
The U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety Inspection Service, which oversees sell-by regulation, referred Snopes to the Chicago City Council and U.S. Food and Drug Administration for further information about the program's origination. We will update this article if we receive a response from either.
What We Know About the Claim
Two explanations have been given for why the Capones supposedly lobbied for expiration dates.
One, as shown in the Reddit post above, suggests he campaigned for clearly printed expiration dates on milk bottles after a relative, in some tellings his sister, became ill after drinking spoiled milk.
The second version of the rumor is less altruistic: Capone supposedly controlled equipment previously used to mark alcohol bottles during Prohibition and if "use by" dates became the norm, he was in a position to make a profit off of related regulation.
But as the BBC reported, neither of these stories has been established as "100% hard fact." As Vice pointed out, the story provides "an interesting footnote in the struggle of enforcing food quality through expiration dates."
The story appears to have originated in the 2010 book "Uncle Al Capone: The Untold Story from Inside His Family," written by his grandniece, Deirdre Marie Capone. On page 43, she described the gangster's supposed involvement in the rollout of expiration dates:
Al turned his keen businessman's eye to less conspicuous business — and happened upon the dairy industry. As he put it himself, "You gotta have a product that everybody needs every day. We don't have it in booze. Except for the lushes, most people only buy a couple of fifths of gin or Scotch when they're having a party. The working man laps up half a dozen bottles of beer on Saturday night, and that's it for the week.
But with milk! Every family, every day, wants it on the table… Do you guys know there's a bigger markup in fresh milk than there is in alcohol? Honest to God, we've been in the wrong racket right along."
Al and Ralph already had access to bottling facilities for their bootlegging business, so it wasn't hard for them to add milk to their slate of products. My grandfather Ralph is credited with being the first to date-stamp milk bottles. Though most people think he got his nickname "Bottles" from being a bootlegger, it actually came from his clever idea about putting the date on milk bottles so that people at the grocery store would know how fresh the product was.
But selling milk and other soft beverages never quite took off in the same way selling liquor had. And Al wasn't ready to trade in his high-rolling lifestyle for the more tame life of a milkman.
Except for infant formula, product dating is not required by federal regulations, according to the federal Food Safety and Inspection Service, which provides only dating guidance. Food manufacturers voluntarily include these dates, which may also be referred to as "sell by" and "use by," to describe the best-quality dates. (Just because food is past the date printed on the package, it doesn't mean it has gone bad.)
Manufacturers determine quality dates based on the length of time and the temperature at which a product is held during distribution and offered for sale, as well as the type of food and packaging, according to FSIS.
Several major pieces of legislation affected food labeling standards; however, most of them became law decades after Capone's 1947 death. According to a 2010 report by the U.S. Institute of Medicine, until the late 1960s, there "was little information on food labels to identify the nutrient content of the food."
- The Fair Packaging and Labeling Act was enacted in 1967. It directs the Federal Trade Commission and the FDA to issue regulations requiring that all "consumer commodities" be labeled to disclose certain characteristics, such as net contents.
- Lawmakers passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act in 1990, which gave the FDA the power to set uniform nutrition labeling standards for most foods.
- The Food Date Labeling Act of 2023 established requirements for the format of quality date and discard date labels on a food label.
For more information on the history of "use by" dates for milk specifically, Snopes contacted the Dairy Farmers of America. We will update this article if we receive a response.
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