Color-Coded Bread Bag Ties: Who Knew?

So, I was on g-chat talking with one of my fabulous best friends and she sent me a link to this article about color-coded bread bag ties.  Did you know there's a way to help figure out how fresh store-bought bread is?  I didn’t!!!!  This is unbelievable to me.  All you have to do is look at the twist-tie or plastic tab that keeps the bag closed.  Turns out, it's color-coded to reflect the day that the bread is baked.  HOW AWESOME IS THAT?  It seems unlikely but Snopes.com dug into it and found that it became an almost-universal practice among commercial bakeries as a way to help grocery store restockers recognize which loaves to replace on their shelves.

To remember which color is which day, put the colors in alphabetical order. Here's the breakdown:

• Blue: Monday
• Green: Tuesday
• Red: Thursday
• White: Friday
• Yellow: Saturday

This whole system was set up to help the supermarkets and grocers identify which bread was new, which was getting old (so it can be put on sale), and which was out of date and needed to be removed from the shelves. As a general rule of thumb, you should only see two colors of tags on the shelves at any one time, or three maximum for those days when bread wasn't delivered. But that doesn’t stop the old bread from sneaking in though.  Do a check next time and see for yourself.

There are certainly some exceptions to this practice so they don’t recommend relying on it exclusively to determine freshness. Some bakeries will use their own color-coding systems or only one color altogether, and always remember that the date on the tag is the date the bread needs to be sold by, not the date it was baked on.

Now…..we just want to know why bread isn't baked on Wednesdays.

Do you know of any other food packaging color-codes?

Read more: http://www.kitchendaily.com/2011/04/07/color-coded-bread-bag-ties/?commentspage=2#ixzz1KBkxPtRG

RGL