Contents

Cooked chicken sealed and retorted in the can. Commercially sterile, which is the difference between five years in a cupboard and five days in a fridge.

How long it keeps

Unopened, this keeps 5 years — which is what puts it on the long shelf.

As sold Unopened, in the cupboard Once opened
as sold 5 years 3–4 days — refrigerated

Counted from the day you bought it. Figures are the USDA FSIS FoodKeeper table's, for unopened storage at room temperature; FoodKeeper counts a month as 30 days.

The table was not pulled from USDA — fsis.usda.gov answers 403 to non-browser clients from this machine — so it came from a mirror of the data.gov dataset and its vintage is unverified. Treat a single figure as indicative, not as a use-by date.