An interesting twist ! One could look at it that way.
Red cell products ultimately do deteriorate and that's why they must have an expiration date. Hemolysis is often the first visual clue. However, that doesn't mean that all of the antigens have suddenly become unrecognizable; it just means some of the older cells in the vial have popped. Studies have been published demonstrating that antigens remain stable many days/weeks after official expiration.
Manufacturers do have oodles of stability data - both static (in-house) and following shipping. Typically a unit of red cells that is turned into a red cell product has at least an eight-week expiration. This allows for manufacturing and shipping to the end users who then usually have five-weeks left on the expiration. In reality, those expiration dates could be longer, but the manufacturers deliberately give themselves a buffer period, just in case.
The wildcard in this whole process and issue upon which the regulatory agencies focus is shipping. How do the end users know that something horrible didn't happen to the material ? An unanswerable question. Even though the manufacturers have shipping stability data, they can't possibly foresee and test every odd, weird situation. One could argue that Ortho have less faith in their shipping process than other suppliers, hence the requirement for periodic QC.