Attention Walmart Shoppers: This Color Code Will Help You Find The Freshest Baked Goods

Getting freshly baked bread straight from the grocery store is one of the best modern conveniences. Usually it's already packaged and sliced, eliminating even the tiniest step of prep, and the prices are often much cheaper than they are in a local bakery — even if there are some red flags to look out for. Now, most of us consider fresh bread one that is baked the day-of, but at the supermarket, baked goods can carry the label "fresh" even if they were made a few days prior. That's why some stores, such as Walmart, use a color-coding system where the color of the twist tie on the bread package signifies which day of the week the loaf was baked.

At Walmart, items baked on Monday will have a blue clip or tie, Tuesday's goods will be coded with green, Thursday's with red, Friday's with white, and Saturday's with yellow. Wednesdays and Sundays don't have a color, so presumably the in-house bakery gets time off on those days. In a regular grocery run, you probably won't see all of these colors on the shelves at once, as it's unlikely for nearly a week-old bread to still be selling. You'll probably be seeing two colors, marking the loaves baked the day-of and the one before. So, if you're heading to Walmart on a Tuesday, the packages closed with a green tie will be fresher than those closed with a blue one.

Not only is the bakery color code helpful for the customers trying to choose the absolute best store-bought bread, it's also useful for the employees who have to determine which items should be removed from the selection and which should go on sale. When perusing the bakery section, you might see an older loaf or two that the store has put on clearance with a significant discount, in hopes that it doesn't have to toss it.

Sometimes the freshest bread gets discounted too, as part of Walmart's rollback sale, which is a temporary discount that is only active for a limited time. Clearance and rollback sales are color-coded as well, so it pays off to learn about Walmart's price tags. Even at standard prices, though, the bread at Walmart is incredibly affordable, especially given that it's freshly baked. For example, a 14 ounce loaf of French bread whole or sliced only costs $1.47.