How long does Formula last in the fridge once opened?
Turning the range into a date
Formula keeps 1 day in the fridge once opened. Two clocks run on this item: one from the day it went into storage and one from the day the seal broke. Both are listed below, 1 row in all.
- Once opened · in the pantry1 hour, and no date will help: it is shorter than a day
- Once opened · in the fridgeUse by1 day after the day you opened it
The edge of its own category
This item is the shortest-lived entry in the Baby Food list: 1 day outside the freezer, against 2 days for Liquid concentrate or ready-to-feed formula, the item immediately above it. All 5 of the others keep longer. It stands 6 of 6 on its shelf, one step below Liquid concentrate or ready-to-feed formula at 2 days. Prepared and prepare are the same food in the source list.
Every storage figure the USDA publishes for this item
The USDA gives this item a pantry and a refrigerator figure and no freezer figure at all, the pattern behind 79 of the 466 foods in the data.
- Once opened · in the pantry1 hour
- Once opened · in the fridge1 day
Why this page prints no multiplier against the room-temperature figure
The USDA's figure in the pantry once opened is 1 hour, and 1 hour is a limit on standing at room temperature rather than a window for storing it. No multiplier is printed on this page at all. A ratio whose denominator is a safety limit turns a danger-zone rule into a benefit, and there is no second window here to divide by instead.
What the USDA adds in words
The USDA attaches 1 handling note to this item, reproduced below word for word. It is about safety rather than quality, which is the distinction this data is easiest to get wrong. 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.
In the pantry. Should be discarded after use-by date.
Is it still safe to eat, or just past its best?
The answer at the top of this page reads 1 day in the fridge once opened. What decides that is the food: the source files Formula, prepared under Baby Food, a heading it keeps for perishable food. Past it, it is not safe to eat: throw it out without tasting, because bacteria build up while food still looks and smells fine.
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 Formula, prepared past its 1 day in the fridge once opened 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. The USDA also caps this at 1 hour standing at room temperature. That is the clock running while food stands in a warm kitchen, not a shelf life. 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.
Two places, and one of them is the wrong one
The USDA rates two places for Formula, prepared in one state and they disagree: 1 day in the fridge once opened against 1 hour in the pantry once opened. This page answers with the refrigerator, the longer of the two. Both figures are the USDA's own, so this is a choice of where to put the food rather than a disagreement about how long it keeps.
Is that a long time?
This item is the shortest-lived thing the USDA files under Baby Food: 1 day, where the item above it, Liquid concentrate or ready-to-feed formula, holds 2 days and the middle of the 6-item list sits at 2 days.
Items that behave the same way
All 3 of the nearest items keep at least as long as this item, 2 days to 1 month against its 1 day: it is the bottom of its own cluster.
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, pantry after opening and refrigerator after opening: Roasted nuts. 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. Of the 1 shown, 1 keeps longer than this one. The longest-keeping of them is Roasted nuts at 4 weeks. Counted more loosely, by which of the three places are rated at all, 79 products match this one.
- Roasted nuts4 weeks in the fridge once opened
Closest by shape, but not an exact match — they share most of these places, not all of them.
- Dinners2 days in the fridge once opened
- Liquid concentrate or ready-to-feed formula2 days in the fridge once opened
- Jars or pouches2 days in the fridge once opened
- Fruit3 days in the fridge once opened
- Cereal, dry mixes1 month in the pantry once opened
The rest of the Baby Food shelf
Every one of the other 5 products on the Baby Food shelf keeps longer outside the freezer than this one, from Cereal, dry mixes at 1 month down to Liquid concentrate or ready-to-feed formula at 2 days. The closest of them by window are Dinners, Liquid concentrate or ready-to-feed formula and Jars or pouches, and the gap between this product and the rest of its shelf is the thing worth noticing here. Across the whole of Baby Food the same product ranks 6 of 6.
- Dinners2 days2 days in the fridge once opened
- Liquid concentrate or ready-to-feed formula2 days2 days in the fridge once opened
- Jars or pouches3 days2 days in the fridge once opened
- Fruit3 days3 days in the fridge once opened
- Cereal, dry mixes1 month1 month in the pantry once opened
If it has to keep longer than this
If it has to keep longer than 1 day, the Baby Food aisle gives 5 products that hold at least twice as long outside the freezer. The smallest step up is Dinners at 2 days against this one's 1 day; after it come Liquid concentrate or ready-to-feed formula, Jars or pouches and Fruit. They are printed below in the order the step gets bigger, not alphabetically. The largest step the category offers is Cereal, dry mixes at 1 month. Twice as long is the cutoff used here, so a product a few days apart from this one is not treated as a step.
- Dinners2 days2 days in the fridge once opened
- Liquid concentrate or ready-to-feed formula2 days2 days in the fridge once opened
- Jars or pouches3 days2 days in the fridge once opened
- Fruit3 days3 days in the fridge once opened
- Cereal, dry mixes1 month1 month in the pantry once opened
The record this page is built from
This page is built from a single FoodKeeper row, record 368 — the source’s own number for it, not a position — one of the 661 rows in the snapshot. That row fills 2 of the nine storage slots with a time, and the source prints its binding figure in days, so the window at the top of this page is the source's own number untouched. The record carries 1 handling note, quoted on this page word for word. Every figure here comes from one fixed snapshot, USDA FoodKeeper, retrieved 1 September 2026, and is not refreshed page by page.
Where these numbers come from
How long does this food keep in the refrigerator, in the freezer, in the pantry? Can you freeze it, and how much of its shelf life is left once the package is open? Every answer on this page is the USDA’s own published figure, one of the 9 it keeps per food, and never an estimate of ours.
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: Formula, prepare, prepared
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.