Originally published on March 3, 2015

Administrators last month investigated a student’s report of a possibly expired yogurt cup from the school cafeteria, but found no food safety issues.

On Jan. 9, senior Charis Jiang went to the cafeteria to get a school lunch and took a yogurt with a date of Dec. 30 printed on it. Jiang noticed and showed her marine science teacher Catherine Christensen, who told assistant principal of administration Michael Yi.

Yi, after learning about the yogurt, went to the cafeteria to investigate and the café manager told him that the yogurts are delivered in boxes and once in a while she finds one or two yogurts has a date that has passed. The cafeteria workers check the dates by school and district policy to ensure food quality, but it is unrealistic to thoroughly inspect each of the hundreds of food items every day, according to Yi. He also inspected the expiration dates of the perishable foods being served that day, but found none that had expired.

“We take every case very seriously, which is why we need to find out as much information as possible.”

Expiration dates are often just guidelines to get the best quality and not the date the food goes rotten, according to the Department of Agriculture. Quality of food also depends on other factors like how the food is stored.

San Francisco Unified School District’s Student Nutrition Services investigated what happened and found no food safety issues, according to Director of Student Nutrition Zetta Reicker. Additional preventative training was provided, however, to ensure food safety standards. “We take every case very seriously, which is why we need to find out as much information as possible,” Reicker said. “Any time there is any issue of quality we need to see the actual product so we can either look at it ourselves, send it back to the manufacturer, or send it to a lab for testing to see what happened.”

Though incidents with food are rare, they happen occasionally throughout the District, according to Reicker. The Student Nutrition Services aims to prevent these kinds of mishaps by having a Food Safety Certified Manager on-site at each school. There is also a “first-in first-out” policy to ensure that students and teachers receive fresh food every day.

This incident has opened one student’s eyes about the quality of cafeteria food. “Now I am constantly checking to make sure the milk and stuff like that are not expired,” Jiang said.

Jade Fong and Caleb Hillidakis contributed to this article.