How long does Cinnamon last in the pantry?
Turning the range into a date
Cinnamon keeps 3–4 years sealed in the pantry. Counting 4 years forward from a date is not arithmetic anyone does reliably in their head. Give the field the day it went into storage.
- Unopened · in the pantryUse by3 years to 4 years after the day you bought it
Built to sit on a shelf
This item is built to sit. It keeps 4 years outside the freezer. Among the 244 foods the USDA also gives a pantry figure, it keeps longer than 92% of them. It is long enough that the date it went into storage matters more than anything you can judge by looking at it. Ground, dried and commercially bottled are the same food in the source list.
Every storage figure the USDA publishes for this item
The USDA rates this item in the pantry and nowhere else, one of 84 foods of the 466 it files that way.
- Unopened · in the pantry3 years to 4 years
Can you freeze cinnamon?
The USDA prints no freezer time for cinnamon. Frozen at 0 °F any food stays safe; whether it is still good after thawing is a matter of quality. Keep the fridge at 40 °F or below and the freezer at 0 °F.
How to tell if cinnamon has gone bad
Go by the date first: cinnamon keeps 3–4 years sealed in the pantry. Insects, a musty or rancid smell, clumping from damp, or a swollen can mean it goes out. Any dish you cook with it follows the 2-hour rule, 1 hour above 90 °F.
Sources: USDA FSIS: the danger zone USDA FSIS: freezing and food safety FDA: are you storing food safely FoodSafety.gov: the FoodKeeper app.
Is it still safe to eat, or just past its best?
The answer at the top of this page reads 3 years to 4 years in the pantry. The USDA rating this place at all is the USDA saying it keeps there, so the figure rates how good it will be. Past it, whether it has gone bad is yours to judge by look and smell: this window rates quality, not the day it turns hazardous.
It is past the date. Now what?
Say the calculator above puts it past its 3 years to 4 years in the pantry window. Past that the calendar stops deciding and the food itself does. A rancid, paint-like smell in a nut, an oil or a seed, mold around the neck of a bottle, or a swollen can mean it goes out whatever the date says.
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
The 6 items below are the closest match to this item by storage behavior, running 27 months to 5 years and bracketing its 4 years.
- Coconut oilkeeps 3 years in the pantry
- Coconut cream, cannedkeeps 4 days in the fridge once openedup to 5 years sealed in the pantry
- Sesame seedskeeps 5 years in the pantry
- Tunakeeps 3 years in the pantrycanned
- Corn syrupkeeps 3 years in the pantry
- Tomato pastekeeps 5 days in the fridge once openedup to 27 months sealed in the pantry
Where these numbers come from
Every storage time on this page is the USDA’s own published figure from the FoodKeeper data, one of the 9 it keeps per food, reproduced unchanged and never an estimate of ours. Where the USDA lists several kinds under one name, each kind keeps its own windows, and the page names the kind its answer is for. The dates and multipliers are ours, computed from those ranges.
Source: USDA FoodKeeper, retrieved 1 September 2026. Found a figure that does not match the source? Tell us on the contact page. How the site is built is on the method page.
USDA index terms: bottle, bottled, bulk, Cinnamon, commercial, commercially, commercially bottled, dried, ground, purchase, purchased, purchased in bulk
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.