How long can you leave food in the freezer?

So, yes, food can remain safe indefinitely, assuming your freezer was running well the entire time. But will frozen food retain its quality indefinitely? That’s a different story. 

How long can frozen food retain its quality?

Lots of potential outcomes here, as we explain below, but generally, well-packaged foods will do fine for months or even more than a year, with some nuances for specific foods. 

The true longevity of a frozen food depends on factors including how the food was handled before it landed in your freezer, how well your freezer stays at 0 degrees Fahrenheit, how the food was prepared and packaged and what the food is. Let’s go through them.

• How the food was frozen. Commercial frozen goods are typically rapid or flash frozen, Gummalla told me. “Rapid freezing means better texture,” he said. “The crystals are finer and they are less intrusive into the cell tissues. If you have slow freezing, then you end up creating larger crystals, and larger crystals tend to rupture cell walls, so then you have more fluids coming out of the cells.”
  
  You probably won’t notice any ruptured cell walls until you defrost the food and find much more liquid and an off texture. (If you’ve ever frozen a banana and then discovered it thawed into limp blob and a puddle of banana liquid, you get the idea.) So, to flash freeze foods, and thus achieve tiny ice crystals, food companies use special techniques. They might blast the food with air colder than -30 degrees Fahrenheit or even spray the food with -320 Fahrenheit liquid nitrogen. One delightful-sounding method uses a perforated belt to blast frigid air from below onto small food pieces (like peas, small fruits, corn or diced veggies). As the veggies rise, tumble and dance, the cold air evenly freezes them and prevents them from sticking together. 
  
  So, commercially frozen foods will freeze faster and colder with smaller crystals, which helps them retain their texture and flavor. That said, using your home fridge to freeze food is still a great option and can keep your food in good shape for a long time. 
  
• What happened to the food before you put it in your freezer. A food can be perfectly frozen at the factory, but if its cold chain isn’t well maintained between the factory, store and your kitchen, it may lose some quality. A thawed food that’s been above 40 degrees Fahrenheit for more than four hours may no longer be safe. And while a popsicle, for example, that briefly warms to the high 20s may not melt into a puddle, it could develop syrupy strings; the sugar lowers the popsicle’s freezing point and it’s possible that its surface may melt, even at below “freezing” temperatures. When the popsicle refreezes, some of the sweetener and other ingredients might separate out into those syrupy threads.

• Whether veggies are blanched. Veggies generally freeze best if they’re given a quick hot water treatment, which deactivates enzymes that would otherwise deplete the food’s color, flavor and texture over time. The quick dunk in boiling water also helps preserve vitamins, kills bacteria and can make certain veggies easier to pack (consider how heat shrinks and softens spinach). Next time you cook store-bought frozen broccoli or green beans, note their green color before you prepare them. You’ll likely see that they’re brighter than their fresh, uncooked counterparts—that’s due to blanching before they were frozen.
  
  Different vegetables require different blanching times, ranging from less than a minute to more than 10 minutes. Fruits don’t typically need blanching before freezing, but depending on the fruit and how the freezer affects its texture, it may be best consumed frozen, blended, or in a cooked dish.
   
• How the food is packaged. Many commercially frozen foods are packaged to minimize moisture loss by creating a barrier between the food and the dry freezer air. Gummalla explained that they might do this with vacuum sealing, tight wraps, or protective glazes. Additionally, a manufacturer might fill any air space in the package with nitrogen, to prevent oxygen from slipping in and causing fats to break down (broken down fats create rancid flavors).

• How well your freezer keeps food at 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Zero degrees is the magic number for a household fridge. If you creep higher by too much, water may more easily escape the food, creating off flavors and textures, and, eventually, the signature white mottled patches of freezer burn. Water that thaws and then refreezes may create larger crystals, which can impact quality, even if no freezer burn sets in. 
  
  The colder a freezer is, the better it is at slowing down other chemical and biochemical processes, like oil breakdown and enzymatic activity, that will eventually cause a food’s quality to decline. In most cases, it’s a straightforward calculation: colder temps simply lead to a longer shelf life. For example, according to a storage manual published by the World Food Logistics Organization (now the Global Cold Chain Foundation) in 2008, raw, pre-cooked lean meat stored at 5 degrees Fahrenheit might last between 4 and 20 months, depending on how it’s processed and packaged. But at -4 degrees Fahrenheit, that range bumps up to 8 to 33 months. An additional X factor is how often you open your freezer door. In a household freezer, the appliance’s ability to maintain 0 degrees Fahrenheit is impacted by how often, and for how long, room temperature air rushes in.
  
• What the food is. When it comes to proteins, Gummalla said their moisture is critical to their texture and appearance and “even modest moisture loss from freezer burn significantly degrades quality.” Aside from water loss, foods with oils and fats are at risk of going rancid as fats break down and produce chemically and cardboardy flavors over time. Oxygen and warm temperatures speed up this reaction, but it will still happen eventually, even in the frosty depths of your freezer. Saturated fats hold up better than unsaturated fats, so fatty fish, with their unsaturated fats might taste off faster than beef or lean fish.

Of course, there’s also the question of whether the food was worth freezing at all. The National Center for Home Food Preservation maintains a list of foods that don’t tolerate freezing well. That includes items like mayo or sour cream, which can separate, as well as salads with veggies like celery, cucumbers and lettuce which can become limp and waterlogged. To be fair, I will admit to freezing some of these things for short periods of time and just going with the results (am I also a weirdo who sautés frozen salads? yes!). For me, a quick prep lunch of imperfectly frozen food is no biggie—the food often turns out just fine and I appreciate the time, money and food saved. (Though I do have limits. Recently some frozen sardines of unknown vintage found themselves quickly moved from my plate to the compost bin; they definitely went rancid and I learned my lesson.)

What’s the best way to package food at home before freezing?

While home kitchens can’t use all the rapid cooling, nitrogen-filling tricks of industrial food packagers, you can apply the same concepts. Put your food in airtight containers where there’s little opportunity for air to creep in. Too much air exposure can, of course, facilitate ice crystals, freezer burn and oxidation. All that said, you do want to allow some space in a container, particularly a rigid one, for the food, particularly one with a lot of water, to expand. For foods likely to expand while frozen, the PennState Extension suggests between a half inch and 1.5 inches of headspace, depending on the food and the dimensions of the container.

To avoid individual items clumping together, you can freeze them on a baking sheet first and then put them in a container.

To be honest though, I rarely take the time to freeze items individually. And sometimes I freeze my food in takeout containers that don’t have as ideal of a seal as possible. For my purposes, this is fine. I usually use the food fast enough (by which I mean months) that I don’t notice off flavors. So, my approach is to use the most ideal container that’s easily available, but to prioritize getting the food in the freezer and not expend disposable resources or my time to create a perfect freezer burn resistant package.

Ok, but really, I just want guidance for how long I can leave my food frozen?

For conservative guidance, check out this table from Purdue University. You’ll see, for example, that they recommend two to three months for frozen soup. Honestly? I think you can easily get more time than that out of the soup. But, as I’ve said above, it’s good to keep those time frames in mind as a goal and then be comfortable moving past them if you need to. 

My husband, for instance, prepared a filet mignon that had been frozen for many months the other day. He reports that it looked and tasted fine. On the other hand, in No Scrap Left Behind, author Teralyn Pilgrim tells the story of the frozen fish that she kept for five years, even moving it from freezer to freezer as she changed apartments. When she finally cooked it, it was, “firm and rubbery.” As she said to her husband while they choked it down, “The more I eat, the worse it tastes.” So, you know, there are limits. 

Which brings us back to the beginning of this article. Freezers are amazing for hitting pause on the shelf life of our food and are fantastic for reducing household food waste. But food won’t stay tasty in them forever. Wait too long and the food could be unidentifiable and unappealing, and far more likely to be dumped if you, say, have an extended power outage, move away or get a new appliance. So, in the interest of saving money, preventing food waste and not eating freezer burnt food, just try to use that frozen food within several months and if it’s been longer, know that it will probably still taste fine (and will be safe indefinitely). But the quality clock is ticking.