You've probably seen the Soho House story by now. A former employee at Shoreditch House posted a TikTok claiming he was pressured to alter the labels on out-of-date food, reported it internally and then to Hackney Council, and was dismissed shortly after. It's racked up over a million and a half views. Hackney Council and Soho House are both now investigating.
I'm not going to tell you what actually happened there. I don't know, and neither does anyone reading this. He says he was fired for raising it. Soho House says the dismissal was for entirely unrelated reasons. Until one side proves their version, it's a claim, not a fact — and I'd rather use the moment to talk about something I do know: the law, and how to actually run a kitchen so this situation never comes near you.
What the law actually says
Every kitchen deals with two completely different kinds of date, and mixing them up is where most of the trouble starts.
Use by is a safety date. It applies to high-risk, perishable food — raw meat, fish, dairy, anything ready-to-eat and chilled. Selling or serving food past its use-by date is a criminal offence under the Food Safety Act 1990. Not a guideline. Not a judgement call. A criminal offence, full stop, regardless of whether the food looks, smells or tastes fine.
Best before is a quality date. It's about flavour and texture declining, not safety, and food can legally still be sold or served after it — provided it's genuinely still fit to eat. That's the one where a chef's judgement is actually allowed to come into it.
Changing a use-by date to extend it, on anything, is not a grey area. It's altering the one piece of information the law exists specifically to protect, and it's the difference between a quality call and a criminal one.
Blindly changing a label is a crime. Blindly trusting one is a mistake too
Here's the bit I actually want every chef reading this to take away: the date on the label is a guide, not a verdict. Food goes off for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the clock — a fridge running two degrees warm, a delivery that sat on a loading bay too long, a container that wasn't sealed properly. None of that shows up on the label.
So the label tells you when to stop trusting the food by default. It was never supposed to be the only thing you check. Open it, smell it, look at it, trust your training. A product well within date that's clearly turned doesn't get used because the label says it's fine. And a product that's genuinely still good doesn't get binned in a panic the second the date ticks over, either — that's just needless waste. Check your fridges. Properly, not just glancing at the front row.
The labelling system that actually works
If you're still writing dates on masking tape with a biro, or worse, peeling labels off with your fingernails, there's a better way.
I've always preferred frog tape. It's bright, so it's genuinely easy to spot — on a container, on a shelf, and critically, if a scrap of it ever ends up where it shouldn't, like in food. It peels off clean without leaving residue or tearing the container, which matters more than people think when you're relabelling the same tubs daily. And it's cheap enough that there's no excuse not to use it properly.
The bit people get wrong isn't the tape, it's the application. Cut it neatly with scissors or a tape dispenser, write clearly, and make sure the old label is fully gone before the new one goes on — not written over, not half-covered. I genuinely cannot believe how many kitchens still rip tape off with bare hands, leaving half of it stuck to the container and a scrap on the floor. It takes four seconds longer to do it properly, and it's the difference between a system that works and one that invites exactly the kind of mess that ends up on TikTok.
Where this actually matters
None of this is complicated. It's attention, and it's a system that makes doing the right thing the easy thing. A kitchen where labelling is sloppy is a kitchen where shortcuts become normal, and shortcuts on a use-by date are the one shortcut that genuinely isn't yours to take.
Whatever turns out to be true at Shoreditch House, the law underneath the story isn't in dispute. Know the difference between the two dates. Trust your training over the label and the label over your memory. And buy decent tape.
How to actually fix it in your kitchen
Knowing the law is one thing. Getting a whole brigade to follow the same system, every shift, without fail, is the real job. A few things that actually work.
Watch what's already happening before you change anything. Every kitchen has its own habits, good and bad, and half of them have never been written down. Spend a week just looking — who's labelling properly, who's cutting corners, where things actually go wrong. You'll usually find one or two people already doing it right. Copy them before you invent something new.
Pick one system and make it the only system. Not everyone's preferred way, not whatever's quickest for whoever's on section that night. One tape, one format, one place on the container it always goes. The second you allow two ways of doing it, you've got no way of doing it.
Show, don't just tell. A new starter doesn't learn a labelling system from a laminated sheet on the wall. They learn it from watching you do it right, every single time, without exception, until it's automatic for them too. If you cut the corner once in front of them, that's the lesson that sticks, not the poster.
Make it everyone's job to say something. The best kitchens I've worked in, anyone could point at a container and ask "what's the date on that?" without it being a dig. That only happens if the head chef takes it well when a commis questions them. Build that culture early and the system polices itself.
Check it's actually happening, not just that it was explained once. Walk the fridges. Not as a gotcha, just as a habit. Systems drift the second nobody's checking, and they drift fastest exactly when you're too busy to notice.
Stefano Camplone is a chef and the founder of Edit Studio London, making sustainable workwear for professional kitchens. He writes From the Pass, a weekly newsletter for chefs — kitchen news, industry stories and one thing worth your time, every Thursday at 7am. Join here.
Photo courtesy of Silo, London.
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