Food refrigerator storage time
Raw chicken keeps 1 to 2 days in the fridge, cooked leftovers 3 to 4, and whole apples 4 to 6 weeks. Type a food, from milk to deli meat or lettuce, and get the shortest, typical and longest days from one fixed chart. Free in your browser.
- Free
- Runs in your browser
- No sign-up
- Your data stays on your device
Run — free
Worked example
- Food
- cooked chicken
- Food
- cooked_chicken
- Label
- cooked chicken
- Days min
- 3
- Days
- 3
How long does this food last in the refrigerator is one of the most searched kitchen safety questions when leftovers sit on a shelf and you need a number, not a guess. This food refrigerator storage time lookup turns a single food name into fixed day ranges from a stable consumer food-safety reference table covering raw and cooked chicken, ground beef, steak, cooked beef, fresh and cooked fish, milk, eggs, hard and soft cheese, yogurt, butter, bacon, deli meat, general leftovers, strawberries, lettuce, apples, mayonnaise, and hot dogs.
How refrigerator storage times are chosen on this chart
Cold storage slows bacterial growth but does not stop it. Home cooks still need a clock range: raw poultry and ground meat are short-lived, while whole apples and hard cheese can sit for weeks when kept cold and dry. This capability encodes a fixed ladder of typical refrigerator days for common foods under a standard home fridge at or below four degrees Celsius or forty degrees Fahrenheit, with leftovers sealed promptly in shallow containers.
Raw chicken pieces or a whole bird sit at one to two days with one day as the cautious typical mark. Cooked chicken leftovers are three to four days with three typical. Raw ground beef is one to two days.
Raw steaks, chops, or roasts are three to five days. Cooked beef leftovers are three to four. Fresh fish is one to two days; cooked fish leftovers are three to four.
Opened pasteurized milk is five to seven days with seven typical when still smelling and looking sound past the sell-by date only if continuously cold. In-shell eggs are twenty-one to thirty-five days with twenty-eight typical. Opened hard cheese runs about three to four weeks; soft cheeses about one week.
Yogurt is seven to fourteen days opened. Butter spans roughly one to three months refrigerated. Opened bacon is about one week.
Opened deli meat or cold cuts are three to five days. General cooked leftovers are three to four days. Strawberries are three to seven; lettuce five to ten; whole apples four to six weeks.
Opened commercial mayonnaise is about two months. Opened hot dogs are one to two weeks. These are fixed chart targets for lookup and display, not continuous temperature-logger models, not freezer guidance, and not a medical or regulatory certificate for a specific package.
The capability does not size batches by weight, does not model power outages or door-ajar abuse, and does not convert freezer months into fridge days; those are different search intents with different tools. What it does provide is a deterministic dictionary so that cooked chicken always returns the same min, typical, and max triple, which is exactly what dual-language recipe cards, quiz tools, and pantry reminder apps need when they refuse to invent times from free-text blogs.
Where a refrigerator storage time lookup shows up in real work
Home cooks translating how long is leftover chicken good into a three-to-four-day typical target avoid both waste and unsafe eat-or-toss guesses when every lookup comes from one chart. Food bloggers and cookbook editors publish dual-unit or multi-language safety sidebars and need one oracle so the milk window never drifts between drafts of the same chapter. Recipe and meal-prep apps that store a food preference can resolve the name once and store numeric min, typical, and max for expiry reminders.
Culinary schools teach cold-holding literacy; a deterministic chart makes quizzes and demos reproducible across classrooms without arguing over which blog table is correct. Grocery and restaurant prep flows can map a ticket note of deli meat to a range before they display a station cue. Content pipelines that normalize free-text cook instructions can replace ambiguous phrases with canonical keys and fixed days before re-emitting localized copy.
If you later need vegetable steaming minutes, oven temperature conversion among Celsius, Fahrenheit, and gas marks, or beef doneness internal temperatures, treat those as separate search intents and landings rather than overloading this refrigerator-storage page; the same house keeps those tools distinct so SEO and product contracts stay clear.
What you can do with it
Leftover expiry reminders
Map a user choice of cooked chicken to a three-day typical fridge window so a meal-prep app can schedule an eat-or-freeze notification with min and max guardrails.
Dual-language safety sidebars
Editors emit consistent refrigerator storage windows from one fixed food chart for every pantry item across drafts and locales.
Culinary quiz and LMS checks
Grade food-to-fridge-days items with a deterministic oracle that rejects unknown product labels cleanly.
FAQ
How long does cooked chicken last in the fridge?
This chart uses three to four days for cooked chicken leftovers with three days as the typical target. Raw chicken is one to two days; milk is five to seven; general leftovers are three to four.
What does it cost?
The browser tool is free and runs locally.
How long do eggs last in the fridge?
In-shell eggs keep about three to five weeks in the fridge, with four weeks as the typical mark. Opened milk, by comparison, lasts 5 to 7 days and opened yogurt one to two weeks.
What fridge temperature does the chart assume?
A standard home fridge at or below 4 °C, with leftovers sealed promptly in shallow containers. Warmer shelves, a door left open or a power cut shorten these times, and the chart does not model them.
Does it give freezer times too?
No. The chart covers the refrigerator only. It does not turn freezer months into fridge days, does not size portions by weight and is not a certificate for a specific package, so check the label as well.
Related tools
For developers — API access
Everything on this page is available programmatically. This section is for teams who want to wire it into their own systems; everyone else can just use the tool above.
API endpoint
Prefer to automate it? One authenticated POST creates the task; the result comes back by webhook or a signed link. The same capability also runs here on the web, by email and from Telegram — and soon from our app too.
Call it from your stack
curl -X POST https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/fridge-storage-time \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KIT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"food":"cooked chicken"}'const res = await fetch("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/fridge-storage-time", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.KIT_KEY}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json"
},
body: JSON.stringify({
"food": "cooked chicken"
})
});
const { task_id } = await res.json();import os, requests
res = requests.post(
"https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/fridge-storage-time",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['KIT_KEY']}"},
json={
"food": "cooked chicken"
},
)
task_id = res.json()["task_id"]<?php
$res = file_get_contents("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/fridge-storage-time", false, stream_context_create([
"http" => [
"method" => "POST",
"header" => "Authorization: Bearer " . getenv("KIT_KEY") . "\r\nContent-Type: application/json",
"content" => '{"food":"cooked chicken"}',
],
]));
$task = json_decode($res, true);body := bytes.NewBufferString(`{"food":"cooked chicken"}`)
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/fridge-storage-time", body)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("KIT_KEY"))
req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
res, _ := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)Example request
{
"food": "cooked chicken"
}Example response
{
"task_id": "tsk_a1b2c3d4e5f6a1b2c3d4e5f6",
"type": "cook.fridge_storage_time",
"status": "queued",
"_links": {
"result": "/tasks/tsk_…/result"
}
}The API is asynchronous: the call returns a task_id immediately and the result arrives by webhook. Polling is capped at 1 req/s per task.
Pricing
Published price — no tokens, no invented credits. A failed task is never charged.
Errors
| HTTP | Code | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
401 | unauthorized | Missing or invalid API key. |
402 | insufficient_balance | Your balance doesn't cover the task price. |
404 | unknown_type | That task type doesn't exist. |
429 | rate_limited | Too many requests. Use the webhook instead of polling. |
Technical notes
Enter a name or a common alias such as cold cuts, mayo, or leftover chicken and receive days_min, a typical days target, days_max, a category label, and a short note describing the assumed packaging. The table is intentionally fixed so meal-prep apps, LMS quizzes, and API clients always agree on the same cooked-chicken window instead of scraping conflicting blogs. Unknown items fail with a clear invalid_input message listing known foods.
What you send and what you get back
Send one required field named food, a string such as cooked chicken or milk. Example: milk yields five to seven days with seven typical and category dairy. Use the free browser form while standing at the fridge door, then call the same contract from scripts when you generate meal-prep cards or validate that a user-selected pantry item maps to a numeric range. Wire days into reminder notifications, and use label plus note for human-facing copy next to the countdown. The same value may arrive under common aliases food_name, item, name, product, or ingredient when you reuse form field names from other kitchen tools. Matching is case-insensitive; hyphens and underscores collapse to spaces, so Hard-Cheese and hard_cheese both resolve. On success the response includes food as a stable snake_case key (for example cooked_chicken), label as the human phrase, days_min, days as the typical chart target, days_max, category such as poultry or dairy, note describing the assumed packaging state, known_foods as the full list of accepted English labels, plus formula and method strings that document the table lookup for audit logs. Example: food equal to cooked chicken yields food cooked_chicken, label cooked chicken, days_min three, days three, days_max four, category poultry, and a note about airtight leftovers. Unknown strings such as quinoa or avocado fail with invalid_input and a message that lists known foods so clients can show a picker instead of retrying blindly. Pricing for successful API calls is the published base of $0.002 per item; validation failures do not consume prepaid balance.
Where a refrigerator storage time lookup shows up in real work
Because this capability is a pure parse engine, API pricing is the published base of $0.002 per successful item and failed validation does not consume balance.
Technical questions
How does the food refrigerator storage time lookup work?
It normalizes your food name, resolves common aliases, and returns fixed refrigerator storage days (min, typical, max) plus category and packaging note from a twenty-one-food reference table.
Which foods are supported?
raw chicken, cooked chicken, ground beef, raw steak, cooked beef, fresh fish, cooked fish, milk, eggs, hard cheese, soft cheese, yogurt, butter, bacon, deli meat, leftovers, strawberries, lettuce, apples, mayonnaise, and hot dogs, plus aliases such as cold cuts, mayo, and leftover chicken.
What happens if I send an unknown food?
The request fails with invalid_input and a message listing known foods. Failed validation is not charged.