Fact Check: Al Capone Is Reason We Have Food Expiration Dates?

Claim:

Al Capone lobbied for and ultimately helped establish expiration dates for food after his sister fell ill drinking spoiled milk.

Rating:

Unproven ( About this rating? )

Claims that food expiration dates were lobbied for — and ultimately put into place — because of mobster Al Capone have circulated for years online social media platforms and online news outlets, 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 this writing:

Al Capone is the reason we have expiration dates on milk bottles: After his niece became extremely ill from bad milk, the powerful Chicago gangster lobbied aggressively for expiration dates to be put on milk for the safety of children and pregnant women
by u/Green____cat in interestingasfuck

Aside from anecdotal evidence, Snopes was unable to find any proof to corroborate this claim. We know that most major food labeling requirements occurred in the decades following Capone's 1947 death. However, aside from infant formula, there is no requirement to label expiration dates in the U.S. All such labeling is done so voluntarily by food manufacturers.

For these reasons, we have rated the claim as "Unproven."

We contacted the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety Inspection Service, which oversees sell-by regulation, for further information about the program's origination. We will update this article if we receive a response.

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

There are two iterations to the reason for which the Capone supposedly lobbied for expiration dates.

One, as shown in the Reddit post above, suggests that 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 the 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 .

There are several major pieces of legislation that affected food labeling; however, most of them occurred 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 Food and Drug Administration 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.

Sources:

"Availability of FSIS Food Product Dating Fact Sheet." Federal Register, 9 Apr. 2019, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/04/09/2019-06988/availability-of-fsis-food-product-dating-fact-sheet .

Capone, Deirdre Marie. Uncle Al Capone: The Untold Story from Inside His Family. Recaplodge LLC, 2010.

"Fair Packaging and Labeling Act: Regulations Under Section 4 of the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act." Federal Trade Commission, 12 Dec. 2013, https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/rules/fair-packaging-labeling-act-regulations-under-section-4-fair-packaging-labeling-act .

Mammoser, Gigen. "Al Capone and the Short, Confusing History of Expiration Dates." VICE, 17 Dec. 2016, https://www.vice.com/en/article/al-capone-and-the-short-confusing-history-of-expiration-dates/ .

Symbols, Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Examination of Front-of-Package Nutrition Rating Systems and, et al. "History of Nutrition Labeling." Front-of-Package Nutrition Rating Systems and Symbols: Phase I Report, National Academies Press (US), 2010. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK209859/ .

TikTok - Make Your Day. https://www.tiktok.com/@availyst/video/7394471011493727519 . Accessed 12 Aug. 2024.

"Udderly Astounding Stories about Milk." BBC Bitesize, https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zvbkvk7 . Accessed 12 Aug. 2024.