How long doesBisonlast?

The USDA rates 2 kinds of this separately

The USDA files 2 separate entries under this name — whole and ground — and they do not keep for the same time: Bison, ground holds 1 day to 2 days outside the freezer, Bison, whole holds 3 days to 5 days.

The shortest of these, Bison, ground at 2 days, is a safety limit, and past it the food goes out untasted.

Every storage figure the USDA publishes for this item

The USDA rates this item cold or frozen and never at room temperature: no pantry figure exists for it, as for 222 of the 466 foods in the data that get no pantry time at all. The source also indexes it as whole and ground.

Bison, whole

• In the freezer6 months to 9 months
• In the fridge3 days to 5 days

Bison, ground

• In the freezer3 months to 4 months
• In the fridge1 day to 2 days

Turning the range into a date

Each kind gets its own dated rows here, 4 rows across the 2 the USDA lists under this name, because a date is only worth printing against the window it belongs to.

Bison, whole

• In the freezerUse by6 months to 9 months after the day you stored it
• In the fridgeUse by3 days to 5 days after the day you stored it

Bison, ground

• In the freezerUse by3 months to 4 months after the day you stored it
• In the fridgeUse by1 day to 2 days after the day you stored it

It is past the date. Now what?

Say the shortest window under this name — Bison, ground at 1 day to 2 days in the fridge — has run out, or the container sat out on the counter overnight. Throw the container out without tasting it, and count any hours it already spent out of the refrigerator as part of that window rather than on top of it.

What decides that is the food and not the shelf the source files it on: Bison, ground is an animal food, or made with one. The USDA's limit for perishable food standing at room temperature is 2 hours, or 1 hour when the kitchen is above 90 °F, and that clock runs whatever the storage figure says. Freezing stops the clock but does not turn it back: food already past its window is not rescued by putting it in the freezer. The FoodKeeper entry this page is built from prints storage times and nothing else, so anything past them here is USDA and FSIS guidance rather than a figure from the source. The whole rule, including the cases the source does not cover, is set out under what to do when the date has passed.

Items that behave the same way

Bison carries no single window to compare — its 2 kinds each keep their own — so these 6 are simply what the USDA rates on the same shelf, shortest first: Sausage at 2 days through Retort pouches or boxes at 4 days.

• Sausagekeeps 1 day sealed in the fridgeraw bulk type or patties
• Rabbit, whole, freshkeeps 2 days in the fridge
• Chorizokeeps 1 day in the fridgefresh
• Variety meats, liver, tongue, chitterlings, etc.keeps 1 day sealed in the fridge
• Bratwurstkeeps 2 days in the fridgefresh
• Retort pouches or boxeskeeps 3 days in the fridge once opened

Products the USDA rates in the same places

This is a common shape of record: 33 of the 466 products are rated in the same places, freezer and refrigerator, and 7 of the nine slots are left blank on all of them. Sorted by how close their windows are to this one, the nearest are Egg dishes, Stuffed, raw chicken breasts and Cooked poultry dishes, and the rest of that group is what the list below draws on. The longest-keeping of them is Cooked pasta at 5 days. Counted more loosely, by which of the three places are rated at all, 132 products match this one.

• Egg dishes3 days in the fridge
• Stuffed, raw chicken breasts1 day in the fridge
• Cooked poultry dishes3 days in the fridge
• Fried chicken3 days in the fridge
• Poultry pieces3 days in the fridge
• Cooked fish3 days in the fridge
• Leftovers3 days in the fridgewith meat, fish, poultry, or egg
• Cooked pasta3 days in the fridge

The record this page is built from

The USDA publishes 2 separate rows under this name — records 621 and 622 — and this page carries all of them rather than picking one, because their windows differ. Between them they fill 2 of the nine storage slots with a time. No one of the 2 is the kind the plain name means, so this page prints no single figure: the kinds are listed with their own windows and you pick yours. The same record answers to whole and ground in the source's own index.

Where these numbers come from

Every range on this page is published by the USDA FoodKeeper and reproduced unchanged. The multipliers, the rankings, the percentages and the dates are ours, computed from those ranges. Where the source gives a span such as 3 to 5 weeks, comparisons use the upper figure, and the full span is always printed.

Rankings cover only the items the USDA gives a usable figure for, and identical ranges share a place rather than being ordered arbitrarily. Neighbors are chosen by nearest storage time within the same category, never alphabetically: two foods filed next to each other by name usually have nothing to do with each other. The freezer is excluded from ranking because it flattens almost everything.

Where the USDA lists several kinds under one name, they share one page here and every kind keeps its own windows: the source prints them as separate rows, and a page that merged them would be inventing a figure the source never published. Comparisons and the place in the category are computed for the kind the plain name means — the shell egg for eggs, the can for tuna — which is settled name by name rather than by the order the source lists its rows in, and the page names it. Where the plain name means no single kind, the page prints no single figure at all and lists the kinds instead.

Source: USDA FoodKeeper, retrieved 1 September 2026. This site computes every comparison on this page and takes responsibility for it. Found a figure that does not match the source? Tell us on the contact page, with the page and the row — the parsing is mechanical, so a mismatch is our bug and we want it. How the whole site is built, which figures are ours and where the source can be checked is on the method page.

USDA index terms: bison whole, ground, ground bison, whole

KeepsUntil is an independent reference built on public USDA data. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the Food and Drug Administration. Whether a given window is a safety limit or a quality window is stated on the page that prints it.