Check the expiry date, check it twice

My son, who adores everything Japanese, is particularly fond of the new flavor of A1 steak sauce, Kobe Sesame Teriyaki. When he emptied the bottle last week, my wife and I promised to get him another bottle.

Easier said than done, if you’d like the sauce to be within its sell-by date. That’s what we learned this afternoon, when we set off on the Great
Teriyaki Steak Sauce Hunt.

• The first grocery store we tried, a Mollie Stones in San Bruno, Calif., didn’t carry the sauce at all.

• Next, we visited a Safeway store in Millbrae, which had it listed on the shelf tag, but none in stock.

• We tried the Safeway in Burlingame. It had plenty of bottles… but they all expired in January 2008. We told a store clerk; he removed the bottles, and advised us to check back in a few days for fresh stock.

• Finally, we went to the Lucky store in Millbrae. They had lots of bottles, too — but the first few we saw had expired in October 2007. Then we found one that expired in June 2007! Behind all of them was a single bottle that was good through September 2008. We bought it. (We showed the expired bottles to the customer service manager, and she was livid and very apologetic.)

Amazing, eh? We find expired products in major grocery stores all the time, but this was quite a coincidence.

The moral of the story: Always check the expiration date of goods that you buy, every container, every time.

Update: I went to Kraft’s A1 Steak Sauce Web site, to link it to this post. Kraft doesn’t list the Kobe Sesame Teriyaki flavor. Maybe it’s been discontinued.