The six things every back-of-house label needs, how the FDA date marking rule works, and why a marker on tape keeps letting you down.
BOH labels, short for back-of-house labels, are the prep labels on every container in the walk-in, the reach-ins and the line. Good BOH labels answer six questions for whoever opens the walk-in next: what is this, when was it made, when does it have to go, who made it, what’s in it that could hurt someone, and how should it be kept. For ready-to-eat food that needs to stay cold and will be held more than 24 hours, the FDA Food Code says the date part isn’t optional: it has to be marked, it can be kept at 41°F or below for up to 7 days, and the day you prep it counts as day 1. Your local health code can be stricter, so check it.
That’s the short answer. The rest of this post is how to get those six things onto every container, every shift, including the ones prepped at 5:40 on a Saturday morning by someone who’s been on the line since close.
Here’s what we put on a prep label, and why each one earns its spot.
To be clear about the rules: the FDA Food Code requires the date marking. The name, initials, allergens and storage notes are good practice, and some local codes ask for more. The label is the one place all of that is written down where the food actually is.
The rule most prep labels are built around is section 3-501.17 of the FDA Food Code. In plain words: refrigerated, ready-to-eat food that needs time and temperature control for safety, prepared and held in your kitchen for more than 24 hours, has to be clearly marked with the date or day it must be used, sold or thrown out. Held at 41°F (5°C) or less, that’s a maximum of 7 days. The day of preparation counts as day 1.
That last sentence is where kitchens slip. If you make a batch of chicken salad on Monday, Monday is day 1 and Sunday is day 7. Sunday is the use-by date. A lot of cooks count forward seven days from Monday and write the next Monday, which is day 8. It’s one day, and it’s wrong every time.
Two more details from the same section are worth knowing:
The FDA Food Code is a model code. Your state, county or city adopts it, sometimes an older version, and sometimes with changes. Check with your local health department before you set your own shelf-life rules, and never assume the 7-day maximum is the right shelf life for a specific item. Seven days is the ceiling, not the target.
Put the label where the next person will see it without picking the container up. On the side of a deli quart or a sixth pan, facing out, not on the lid. Lids get swapped. A lid label on the wrong container is worse than no label at all, because now somebody trusts it.
One label per container. If a batch gets split into three pans, that’s three labels with the same dates.
Use labels that come off in the dish machine. The dish crew should not be scraping old tape and adhesive off every pan at the end of the night, and old labels left on a clean container are how an old date ends up on new food.
Nobody sets out to write a bad label. It happens because labeling comes at the end of a task, when the cook is already thinking about the next one.
Marker smears on a cold, wet container. Tape peels in the walk-in. The date is written in whatever format that cook likes, so you’ve got 10/3, 3/10 and "Fri" on the same shelf. Initials get skipped. And the use-by date depends on somebody doing date math in their head at the start of a shift, which is exactly the day-1 mistake above.
Picture a Saturday prep shift. The opener pulls a deli quart of chicken salad from the walk-in. The blue tape on the side says "Chx" and a date that’s half gone, the marker smeared by condensation. Is it Tuesday’s batch or Thursday’s? Nobody on the line knows. The cook who made it is off until Monday and isn’t answering texts. So the quart goes in the trash, and so does the one behind it, because that one has no tape at all. Twenty minutes before doors, somebody’s dicing celery and poaching chicken again instead of setting a station. None of that was about the food going bad. It was about the label not saying enough for the next person to trust it.
We wrote more about this in why we stopped handwriting prep labels. The short version: the cooks are fine. The job is set up wrong, because it asks for careful clerical work with a marker in the middle of prep.
The fix that works is taking the writing and the math away from the cook. With BOH Wiz, the cook taps an item on the prep list and the label prints on a thermal printer with the item name, the prep date, the cook’s initials and a use-by date calculated from that item’s shelf-life rule. Nobody counts days. Nobody types the item name again. The shelf life is set once, by you, and every label after that follows it.
Every printed label is also saved in label history, so you can see what was prepped, by whom, and when it expires. The Expiring screen shows what expired yesterday, what expires today and what expires tomorrow, which is a better start to an opening shift than reading every container in the walk-in with a flashlight.
The labels dissolve in water, so they come off in the dish machine. You can see what prints on the label, and the optional fields like allergen warnings, on our restaurant prep labels page, and how it all fits your food safety routine on food safety labels for restaurants.
On cost: the printer is $299 one time, a pack of 4,000 labels is $99, which comes to about 2.5 cents a label, and the app is $0 a month. There’s no contract.
If you want to see how it holds up on your own line, start a free 30-day trial. We send the printer, you use it through a few real Friday nights, and if it goes back, we pay the return shipping.
About the author: Jose Salazar
Jose Salazar has worked in restaurants for more than 20 years as a restaurant manager, general manager, executive chef and corporate training manager, and has helped open 63 restaurant locations for several restaurant companies. He studied restaurant management and culinary arts, and leads product at BOH Wiz.
Tap an item on the prep list and the label prints. $0 today, and if the printer goes back, you pay nothing.
May 2, 2026 · 5 min read · Kitchen workflow
Three things handwritten labels do badly, why they cost a working kitchen real money, and what changed when we replaced them.
Read post →
May 2, 2026 · 4 min read · Product walkthrough
A walkthrough of the BOH Wiz prep-list-to-printer flow, with screenshots from the actual app. Tap an item, label prints in three seconds.
Read post →
August 28, 2026 · 4 min read · Hardware
Four things decide whether the printer already in your back office can print prep labels. Three things people worry about that mostly don't matter.
Read post →
Comparing options? Read prep labeling systems compared, prep list software compared, or see how the prep list prints labels.
