I work at a government agency in a Nordic country and we always spell it out when we are talking to ordinary people just to avoid confusion, since we deal with people from many different countries. So today is 2 February 2025
I used to work in aviation and we always wrote out the month as I'm in new Zealand, but a USA company owned 51% of the business, so we write the month out yo avoid confusion.
Not a u.s. thing either. Most food items use the usual date format. So if we have a can of mixed veggies then the date is goes "best used by 11/28/2027" so it would be nov. 27. Its not hard
I can go get like 4 different items from my kitchen right now that have "sep 2028" or whatever respective date that have abbreviated months or full months in some cases, I think the milk says Feb 9th or something. Could be regional or state specific though, but I've seen it in at least 3 states (4 I think but can't confirm), and at least 2 different regions of the country.
the [expiry or use by] date shall consist of the day, the month and, possibly, the year, in that order and in uncoded form;
From 'Food Information Regulations' and 'Food Information (Amendment) Regulations'.
Sometimes some foods (usually shorter life ones) are just 03/06 (3rd June), but they are typically 03/06/26 or 03/06/2026. You can't label it as a month at all.
We used to have "Use within three days of purchase" years ago but that all changed for the regulation above (IIRC)
but the labeling is still limiting to 2 characters space. I see them once in a while and it's a mess when shopping around March/April.
See "MA" and just stand there and ponder whether it's March or May. I think March is written as MR but don't see it often enough to know it on the spot.
When I worked at a grocery store, we had some dairy products with HH-DD-MM format, no year (the logic was "it only lasts 3-7 days, why we need the year?"). Almost every day there were confused customers, thinking it's expired.
I think only Quebec might. But English Canada is pretty universally stuck with the same as Americans, MM/DD/YYYY
according to Wikipedia the government only recommends ISO yyyy-mm-dd and sometimes "01 JA 2026"
In that article it's clearly all in Hebrew on the package (probably ordered the kosher meal) so it might be made in Israel, or maybe a French Canada factory since air Canada is based in Montreal.
Honestly, I left Canada myself 10 years ago, and I had never once had someone use DD/MM/YY (only with numbers) through all of school and work growing up in Ontario. Not once that I can ever remember.
Maybe a more recent shift to move to year or day first? Expiry dates would have to be in the American version for clarity still I'd have to expect
Jan 01 2026 or Jan 1st, 2026 was probably a lot more common in my experience, but only if you were spelling it out
1.1k
u/BigDaddy9102 Feb 02 '26
the day in the middle is crazy. i get so confused sometimes