How long food actually lasts in the fridge
Every fridge storage chart on the internet is the same chart, copied from wherever it was first typed up, with no source anywhere near it. This one carries its source on every row: CSIRO’s Refrigerated storage of perishable foods guide where CSIRO publishes a figure, and Australian consumer food-safety guidance — Sustainability Victoria and the NSW Food Authority — where it does not.
It is also the dataset Pantry is built on. Every expiry date the app is designed to put next to an item comes from this table, not a generic week tacked onto everything. This is the page every other post on this site points back to when it cites a number, so bookmark it rather than memorising it.
The table
| Food | Keeps for | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Chicken, raw | 3 days | CSIRO |
| Mince, raw | 2–3 days | CSIRO |
| Milk | 5–7 days | CSIRO |
| Hard cheese | 1–3 months | CSIRO |
| Soft/semi-hard cheese | 2–3 weeks | CSIRO |
| Cottage, ricotta, cream cheese | 10 days | CSIRO |
| Butter | 30 days (cautious end) | CSIRO gives 8 weeks; we hold it shorter |
| Eggs | 3–6 weeks | CSIRO |
| Leafy greens (spinach, lettuce) | 5–7 days | Sustainability Victoria |
| Fresh herbs (parsley, coriander) | 7 days | Sustainability Victoria |
| Mushrooms | 2–3 days | Sustainability Victoria |
| Tomatoes (bench, not fridge) | 5 days | Sustainability Victoria |
| Cooked leftovers | 3 days | NSW Food Authority |
| Cooked rice or pasta | 2 days | NSW Food Authority |
Where CSIRO gives a range, we hold the shorter end, for the same reason CSIRO’s own numbers exist: a home fridge is not a lab, doors get opened, and a cautious number beats an optimistic one.
Why some things are missing
There is no yoghurt row above, on purpose. CSIRO has never published a yoghurt figure, and the number repeated everywhere else on the internet is not CSIRO’s. Where we do not have a real source, we leave the gap visible rather than paper over it with someone else’s guess. The same goes for a dozen other pantry staples — flour, tinned goods, dry rice — that keep for so long the question is closer to “is it still good” than “when does it expire”, which is a different problem to the one this page solves.
Fridge, pantry or freezer
Not everything on this list belongs in the fridge in the first place. Bananas, tomatoes, whole pumpkin and unpeeled garlic last longer out of it — putting them in the crisper is the mistake, not the fix. See the full breakdown, item by item, in where to store fruit and veg.
Freezing changes the question entirely: from a food-safety point of view, most frozen food keeps indefinitely, and the real limit is quality, not risk. That is its own post, not a row in this table — see freezer times, explained.
Two dates that are not the same date
“Best before” and “use by” get used interchangeably in conversation and mean two different things on the label. Getting that distinction right saves more food than any individual shelf-life number does — see best before vs use by.
What this page cannot tell you
A shelf-life chart is a starting point, not a verdict. It cannot smell the chicken, and it does not know how your fridge actually runs — a fridge door shelf sits several degrees warmer than the back of the middle shelf, which is part of why two people can get different answers from the “same” week-old milk. Trust your senses over any chart, this one included.
What a chart like this is for is not needing to guess in the first place. Pantry is built to keep this same dataset behind every item a receipt adds, so the expiry date on the list is this table, not a memory of it. The receipt scanning post has the detail on how that works, and the household food waste numbers explain why a few days one way or the other adds up to real money over a year.