What this site is, where its numbers come from, and what it refuses to do.
StillGoodFor answers one question: how long does this actually keep? Not the date printed on the package — the real storage window, unopened versus after opening, in the pantry, the fridge or the freezer, plus how to tell when something has turned.
It covers 670 foods, drinks and medicines. It is free, needs no sign-up, and the lookup runs entirely in your browser.
It is a small independent site, not a publication with a newsroom or a test kitchen. We do not run our own food-science experiments. What we do is take published guidance from bodies that do, normalise it into one consistent shape, and show you the number with its source attached.
Food and drink storage windows come from the USDA FoodKeeper dataset (USDA FoodKeeper v128), published by the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service and in the public domain. It is the same data behind the government's own FoodKeeper app.
We preserve FoodKeeper's own units. If it says "1–2 months", the page says 1–2 months — not a back-computed "30–60 days" that implies a precision the source never claimed.
9 medicine entries are hand-sourced from FDA guidance and manufacturer labels. They are deliberately limited to storage and what the printed date means. They never give a dose, and never tell you whether an expired medicine is safe to take. That is a question for a pharmacist.
10 products additionally carry spoilage signs researched one at a time from named authorities — university extension services, the FDA and USDA, and in a few cases the manufacturer. Each of those claims renders with the quote it came from and a link to the page it was read on, so you can check us.
7 products are hand-verified where we found FoodKeeper ambiguous or conservative. Where our figure disagrees with FoodKeeper's, the page says so rather than quietly overriding it.
We never invent a number. This is the whole point of the site. If no authoritative figure is published for a situation, that cell is blank. A blank does not mean "it lasts forever" — it means nobody reputable has published a figure, and we would rather show you nothing than a plausible guess.
We say when guidance is general rather than specific. Spoilage signs for most products are category-level guidance, not a finding about that exact item — and every one of those pages says so in as many words. Only the 10 researched products show product-specific signs.
We do not use an AI to generate shelf-life data. The dataset is built by a deterministic script from the sources above. AI is used in exactly one place on this site: matching what you typed to a product that already exists in the database, when a plain text search fails. It picks an existing product; it never produces a number, and the figures you then see are the same published ones any other route would show.
Storage times are guidance, not a guarantee. How cold your fridge actually runs, how fresh something was when you bought it, and how it has been handled all change the real answer. Trust your senses, follow the label, and when in doubt, throw it out.
Some of the rules above are enforced by the build rather than by good intentions. If any of these is violated the site fails to build and nothing ships:
sourced.These are checks in the data pipeline, not editorial promises. The rest of the rules on this page are promises.
It is not medical, veterinary or clinical advice. It is not a substitute for the label on the product in front of you, and it cannot see or smell your food. For anything involving a vulnerable person — an infant, someone pregnant, someone immunocompromised — follow the stricter of the label and your doctor, not us.
Questions, corrections, or a number that looks wrong: hello@stillgoodfor.com. Corrections are the most useful mail we get.