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Safety of “expired” ingredients
I do not make formulations often so I always have left over ingredients that become expired, at least according to the label. The expiration date is labled by the seller not the manufacturer so I do wonder if they mark the date sooner to bump up their sales.Just recently I discovered I had some pure ascorbic acid powder which “expired” on September 2019. Out of 25g I ordered I probably used just 1 or 2 grams so I have quite a lot left and it would really fit into a product. I read that vitamins don’t really expire but degrade, so how risky is using the powder in one of my formulations?I am more cautious with liquid ingredients and never use them after the expiration date but what about solid ingredients? Do they become contaminated or do they just degrade? -
3 Replies
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Regarding “expired” ingredients. We use to regard some ingredients as expired and would dispose of at that date, for others, such as vitamins and minerals we used the date as a re-test date to the assay against the C of A. And this does seem to be accepted pharmaceutical practice for some materials
We used to re-test micro, loss on drying and assay of the vitamin concerned to ensure it either complied with the manufacturer’s C of A or didn’t deviate far from it (in which could be considered analyst error during testing).
However, for 25 g it is probably not worth paying a couple of hundred dollars to do all this. For something that is barely 6 months past expiry, and a product of this nature, and the fact you are likely to be using it in a trial product - I would suspect you can safely use it.
I would be more concerned if you were making a 3 tonne batch and had a couple of hundred kilos going into it - then I would test the hell out of everything and ask QA to extend the retest date.
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@Herbnerd Very helpful to me as well, thank you!
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Thanks!
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