It doesn't say it expires.

It says "mindestens haltbar bis", which is the German translation for "best before".

The manufacturer only guarantees the quality before that date. Afterwards, the anti-caking agent (Rieselhilfen) may not work so well, and the salt could be clumpy.

That's incredibly lucky, then. Imagine digging the salt out of the ground just before it expires, but still with enough time left to sell it.

I have read that water bottle contains expiry date, it is not for the water but to the plastic bottle which will start leaching chemicals after the expiry. I guess it is the same case here.

Even homeopathic medicine is required to have an expiration date, if only for legal compliance.

Homeopathic medicine should be required to actually have an effect, if only for legal compliance.

http://hpathy.com/ask-homeopathy-doctors/do-homeopathic-medi...

If you let the placebo effect count — and why wouldn't you? — it pretty surely will have some effect.

Even better, when combined with a consultation from a homoeopath, you're getting some informal counselling as well as a placebo. This is a pretty sweet combination, assuming you're not actually dying of something, and might keep you away from real pharmaceuticals with real side effects long enough to get better on your own.

(So my view is that homoeopathic remedies are very likely just sugar pills, but that it's far from clear we should be regulating them away on those grounds).

Haha. That is hilarious. 280 million years old, the preservative of preservatives. In many other countries (developing especially) they don't even pay attention to food expiration dates. We have eyes and a nose and they're really good at telling us when food shouldn't be eaten. I have a friend who is from Nigeria and was selling bags of rice at her shop. Food inspectors told her she had to throw the rice away because it had expired. She was devastated because she wasn't even used to thinking about rice expiring, especially not when it's just a few months old. Welcome to the West.

The "best before" time on the rice in my European cupboard is one year. It's still legal to sell it after that date [1]. The EU is considering[2] removing rice from the requirement to have a "best before" date at all, which is already the case for a few things[3], like salt and sugar.

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/food/safety/food_waste/eu_actions/date_...

[3] Annex X http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX:320...

[1] https://www.approvedfood.co.uk/ for example, you can search "rice".