How long doesCreamlast?

The USDA rates 5 kinds of this separately

The USDA files 5 separate entries under this name — whipping, ultrapasteurized, whipped, sweetened, half and half, heavy and light — and they do not keep for the same time: Cream, whipped, sweetened holds 1 day outside the freezer, Cream, whipping, ultrapasteurized holds 1 month.

The shortest of these, Cream, whipped, sweetened at 1 day, 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 whipping, ultrapasteurized, whipped and sweetened.

Cream, whipping, ultrapasteurized

• In the freezernot recommended
• Unopened · in the fridge1 month
• Once opened · in the fridge1 week

Cream, whipped, sweetened

• In the freezer1 month to 2 months
• In the fridge1 day

Cream, half and half

• In the freezer4 months
• Unopened · in the fridge3 days to 4 days

Cream, heavy

• In the freezer3 months to 4 months
• Unopened · in the fridge10 days

Cream, light

• In the freezer3 months to 4 months
• Unopened · in the fridge1 week

What the USDA adds in words

The USDA attaches 1 handling note to this item, reproduced below word for word. It is not a storage time: it qualifies the figure above rather than replacing it. These are the source's own sentences, not ours, and they are the part of the FoodKeeper record that a table of durations cannot carry.

Cream, light, in the freezer. Use for cooking.

Turning the range into a date

Each kind gets its own dated rows here, 10 rows across the 5 the USDA lists under this name, because a date is only worth printing against the window it belongs to.

Cream, whipping, ultrapasteurized

• Unopened · in the fridgeUse by1 month after the day you bought it
• Once opened · in the fridgeUse by1 week after the day you opened it

Cream, whipped, sweetened

• In the freezerUse by1 month to 2 months after the day you stored it
• In the fridgeUse by1 day after the day you stored it

Cream, half and half

• In the freezerUse by4 months after the day you bought it
• Unopened · in the fridgeUse by3 days to 4 days after the day you bought it

Cream, heavy

• In the freezerUse by3 months to 4 months after the day you bought it
• Unopened · in the fridgeUse by10 days after the day you bought it

Cream, light

• In the freezerUse by3 months to 4 months after the day you bought it
• Unopened · in the fridgeUse by1 week after the day you bought it

It is past the date. Now what?

Say the shortest window under this name — Cream, whipped, sweetened at 1 day 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: Cream, whipped, sweetened 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

Cream carries no single window to compare — its 5 kinds each keep their own — so these 6 are simply what the USDA rates on the same shelf, shortest first: Pudding at 2 days through Soy milk at 10 days.

• Puddingkeeps 2 days in the fridge once opened
• Egg disheskeeps 3 days in the fridge
• Egg substituteskeeps 3 days in the fridge
• Eggnog, commercialkeeps 3 days sealed in the fridge
• Kefir, fermented milkkeeps 1 day in the fridge once openedup to 1 week sealed in the fridge
• Soy milkkeeps 7 days in the fridge once opened

Products the USDA rates in the same places

Only 1 other product in the whole file carries the same set of rated places as this one, freezer, freezer from the day of purchase, refrigerator, refrigerator from the day of purchase and refrigerator after opening: Crab meat. That is 1 product out of 466, which makes this a rare shape of record rather than a common one, and it is worth knowing that the comparison below is drawn from a very small group. The longest-keeping of them is Crab meat at 3 days.

• Crab meat1 day in the fridgefresh

Closest by shape, but not an exact match — they share most of these places, not all of them.

• Egg substitutes3 days in the fridge
• Eggs3 weeks sealed in the fridgein shell
• Butter1 month sealed in the fridge
• Buttermilk1 week sealed in the fridge
• Cottage cheese1 week in the fridge once openedup to 2 weeks sealed in the fridge
• Eggnog3 days sealed in the fridge
• Egg dishes3 days in the fridge

The record this page is built from

This name is one of the crowded ones in the file: 5 rows carry it, starting at record 11, out of 661 rows in the snapshot altogether. All 5 are printed on this page as separate kinds, because a page that merged their windows into one figure would be publishing a number the USDA never did. No one of the 5 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.

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: half, heavy, light, sweetened, ultrapasteurized, whipped, whipping

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.