Last updated: 28 July 2026
The freshIt blog publishes practical guides on storing food, reading date labels and cutting waste. This page explains how those guides are made, so you can check for yourself where anything you read here comes from.
Who writes them
The guides are written by the freshIt team. We do not have a food scientist, dietitian or physician on staff, and we don't claim to. What we write rests not on our own expertise but on guidance published by the public bodies listed below.
Which sources we rely on
For food safety and storage times: the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA FSIS), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), FoodSafety.gov, the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA), and — for Türkiye — the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and the Turkish Food Codex.
For waste statistics: the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Food Waste Index reports, and for Türkiye-specific figures, named institutional reports with the source stated in the text.
Every article ends with the list of sources used in it, linked directly. If we cannot tie a claim to a source, we either soften it or remove it.
A note on date terminology
"Use-by" and "best-before" are not the same thing. A use-by date is a safety limit on foods that spoil microbiologically; a best-before date is a quality limit, after which a product may still be safe but the manufacturer no longer guarantees freshness.
In everyday speech both get called an "expiry date". We use that common phrasing for readability, but we spell out the distinction wherever the difference between safety and quality actually matters.
Our limits
What we publish is general information for household use. It does not replace the storage and use-by instructions printed on the product; where the two disagree, the packaging wins.
Our content is not medical advice. If you suspect a foodborne illness, seek medical care. Risk thresholds differ during pregnancy, for immunocompromised people and for young children — in those cases your doctor's guidance takes precedence.
If you are unsure whether a food is safe, don't eat it.
Updates and corrections
When the institutional guidance we rely on changes, we update the affected article. Updated articles show the revision date in their header.
If you spot an error, write to us at hello@freshit.app. We correct factual mistakes and note the correction in the article.
Commercial relationships
Our articles carry no paid placements, sponsored content or affiliate links. External links we give as sources are citations, not endorsements or partnerships.
We do mention the freshIt app in our articles; that is product promotion, and the content itself is written to be useful without the app.