How long doEgg substituteslast in the fridge?
The USDA rates 2 kinds of this separately
The USDA files 2 separate entries under this name — liquid and USDA record 310 — and they do not keep for the same time: Egg substitutes holds 3 days to 4 days outside the freezer, Egg substitutes, liquid holds 7 days.
Freezing changes the unit, not just the number
Here the freezer does not so much extend the answer as replace it. 4 days in the refrigerator becomes 12 months in the freezer: 90 times longer, and days turning into months. The kinds do not agree about the freezer: rated for at least one of them and marked not recommended for another.
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 liquid.
Egg substitutes, liquid
- In the freezernot recommended
- Unopened · in the fridge7 days
- Once opened · in the fridge3 days
Egg substitutes
- In the freezer12 months
- In the fridge3 days to 4 days
What the USDA adds in words
The USDA attaches 2 handling notes to this item, reproduced below word for word. 1 of the 2 are about safety rather than quality, and it is printed first. 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.
Egg substitutes, in the freezer, from the day you bought it. Keep frozen. For safety, cook as directed.
Egg substitutes, in the refrigerator. Recommendation is for storage after cooking.
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.
Egg substitutes, liquid
- Unopened · in the fridgeUse by7 days after the day you bought it
- Once opened · in the fridgeUse by3 days after the day you opened it
Egg substitutes
- In the freezerUse by12 months after the day you bought it
- In the fridgeUse by3 days to 4 days after the day you stored it
Is this window about safety or about taste?
The answer at the top of this page reads 3 days to 4 days in the fridge. What decides that is the record's own note: this figure is for the product after cooking, which is cooked and still moist. Past it, throw it out rather than taste it: a perishable food can carry enough bacteria to make you ill while it still looks and smells fine.
The figure in the freezer here is a quality window. The same page carries windows of more than one kind, so which sentence applies depends on which row you are reading, not on the food. Held at 0 °F food stays safe for as long as it stays frozen, which is why a freezer figure counts as quality on this site whatever the food is. Every figure assumes the food was sound when you stored it, that your refrigerator holds 40 °F or below and your freezer 0 °F or below, and that the package was handled normally.
It is past the date. Now what?
Say the calculator above puts Egg substitutes past its 3 days to 4 days in the fridge window, 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.
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.
Is that a long time?
2 items in the Dairy Products & Eggs list keep exactly as long as Egg substitutes, 4 days, so they all share place 27 of 29 rather than being put in an order the data does not support. Among the 340 foods the USDA also gives a refrigerator figure, it keeps longer than 39% of them.
Items that behave the same way
The 6 items below are the closest match to Egg substitutes by storage behavior, running 2 days to 10 days and bracketing its 4 days.
- Egg disheskeeps exactly as long
- Eggnog, commercialkeeps 3 days sealed in the fridge
- Puddingkeeps 2 days in the fridge once opened
- 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
- Coconut milkkeeps 7 days in the fridge once opened
Products the USDA rates in the same places
No other product in the file is rated in exactly this set of places: freezer from the day of purchase, refrigerator, refrigerator from the day of purchase and refrigerator after opening, and nothing else. That makes the shape of this record unique among the 466 products here, so the closest comparisons available are the entries that share most of it — Eggnog, Kefir and Buttermilk. Their windows are printed beside them below, and none of them is rated in quite the same way.
Nothing carries this exact set of places, so these share most of it.
- Eggnog3 days sealed in the fridge
- Kefir1 day in the fridge once openedup to 1 week 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
- Ricotta1 week in the fridge once openedup to 2 weeks sealed in the fridge
- Eggs3 weeks sealed in the fridgein shell
- Butter1 month sealed in the fridge
- Vegan Cheddar Cheese3 days in the fridge once openedup to 4 months sealed in the fridge
The rest of the Dairy Products & Eggs shelf
The USDA puts this product on the Dairy Products & Eggs shelf together with 28 others, and 26 of them keep longer outside the freezer. The shelf runs from Powdered milk at 5 years down to Pudding at 2 days. Nearest this product by window are Egg dishes, Eggnog and Pudding, which is the order the list below is printed in. The order counts the longest window outside the freezer, so Egg substitutes sits here at 4 days rather than at the 3 days in the fridge its own answer prints.
- Egg dishes4 days3 days in the fridge
- Eggnog5 days3 days sealed in the fridge
- Pudding2 days2 days in the fridge once opened
- Kefir1 week1 day in the fridge once opened
- Soy milk10 days7 days in the fridge once opened
- Almond milk10 days7 days in the fridge once opened
- Rice milk10 days7 days in the fridge once opened
- Coconut milk10 days7 days in the fridge once opened
If it has to keep longer than this
If it has to keep longer than 4 days, the Dairy Products & Eggs aisle gives 24 products that hold at least twice as long outside the freezer. The smallest step up is Soy milk at 10 days against this one's 4 days; after it come Almond milk, Rice milk and Coconut milk. They are printed below in the order the step gets bigger, not alphabetically. In the other direction, 1 entry in the category keeps half as long or less, Pudding among them. The largest step the category offers is Powdered milk at 5 years.
- Soy milk10 days7 days in the fridge once opened
- Almond milk10 days7 days in the fridge once opened
- Rice milk10 days7 days in the fridge once opened
- Coconut milk10 days7 days in the fridge once opened
- Quark10 days7 days in the fridge
- Buttermilk2 weeks1 week sealed in the fridge
- Cottage cheese2 weeks1 week in the fridge once opened
- Cream cheese2 weeks2 weeks sealed in the fridge
The record this page is built from
The USDA publishes 2 separate rows under this name — records 17 and 310 — and this page carries all of them rather than picking one, because their windows differ. Between them they fill 4 of the nine storage slots with a time. Comparisons and the place in the category are computed for Egg substitutes, which is the kind the plain name means here, chosen kind by kind rather than by the order the source happens to list them in. 1 slot is marked not recommended, which is an answer rather than a gap.
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: egg, Egg substitute, liquid, substitute, substitutes
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.