Beyond Best Before's shelves are lined with perfectly good chocolate, biscuits, oat milk, ice cream, juice, cheese and loads more.
All of this would have been thrown out had Maggie and her sister Katie Quach not stepped in to intervene.
The business model of their store, which recently had its soft launch in Sydney, involves them purchasing goods that are deemed unfit to sell at conventional grocery stores from suppliers and distributors.
They purchase goods at a discount and sell them at prices they have been keen to keep low during the cost of living crisis.
"The idea behind it has always been that we want to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill," Maggie said.
Australia currently creates more than 7.6 million tonnes of food waste each year, according to Australia’s largest food relief organisation Foodbank.
The charity estimates 70 per cent of this food waste is perfectly edible.
While the , the Food and Agribusiness Growth Centre’s 2021 National Food Waste Baseline showed goes into landfill each year from retailers.
"With our products, it's about raising awareness - we want to change the perception of what's still edible and what's still appropriate," Maggie said.
What is the difference between use-by and best-before dates?
Maggie said often, when products are past their best-before date, "the quality is still there, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the product".
There's an important difference between the used by date on food and the best before date.
Used by is the point where it is not safe to eat and should be thrown away according to the New South Wales government's food authority.
The store works by intercepting goods from distributors that are destined for waste, and then selling them cheaply to consumers. Source: Supplied
The authority says foods can be legally sold after a best-before date as long as they are not damaged, deteriorated or perished and can be expected to retain their colour, taste, texture and flavour as long as they are stored correctly.
For their initial launch, the business has stocked food with one to six months of shelf life left, but they plan to move into selling items that are past the best-before date.
How does Maggie verify that it's all safe to eat?
"I personally verify it by eating food past the used-by date, I find that the product still tastes fantastic. And if I can get it for a fraction of the price, even better," Maggie said.
"With soft cheese, it's actually best to consume it on the best-before date."
She said supply chains are inherently set up to waste so much more than needed because of the time it takes to get food from the start of the process all the way to when it gets to people's homes.
"I've spoken to quite a lot of customers, and people actually think these short best-before dates are just a profit-making label for big companies," Maggie said.
"With some of these line items, even though they have six months of shelf life left, in the eyes of the distributors and the manufacturer is that product, each now basically considered waste products."
Fruit and vegetables are not on the cards for the business, partly because there are other companies competing that resell produce rejected by mainstream distributors and because it's hard to manage with the number of staff they have.
Maggie said the whole journey so far has been really rewarding.
"Shops like this are a really good place to start sharing information, and we're able to spread this information to more people, which is really good because we're raising awareness around all of these waste products."
