How long doesColeslawlast in the fridge?

A short window, and what shortens it further

This item is one of the short-lived entries in the data: 5 days outside the freezer, position 8 of 25 in the Deli & Prepared Foods list. At that scale a day of delay is a large share of the whole window, which is why the figure is printed as a range rather than an average.

Every storage figure the USDA publishes for this item

The refrigerator is the only place the USDA gives this item a storage time, as it does for 64 of the 466 foods the USDA lists.

• In the fridge3 days to 5 days

Turning the range into a date

One row, one deadline: 5 days in the refrigerator, counted from the day it went in rather than the day it was made.

• In the fridgeUse by3 days to 5 days after the day you stored it

Is this window about safety or about taste?

The answer at the top of this page reads 3 days to 5 days in the fridge. What decides that is the food: the source files Coleslaw, homemade, prepared under Deli & Prepared Foods, a heading it keeps for perishable food. Past it, throw it out rather than taste it: a perishable food can carry enough bacteria to make you ill while it 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 Coleslaw, homemade, prepared past its 3 days to 5 days in the fridge 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 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.

Is that a long time?

4 items in the Deli & Prepared Foods list keep exactly as long as this item, 5 days, so they all share place 8 of 25 rather than being put in an order the data does not support. Among the 340 foods the USDA also gives a refrigerator figure, it keeps longer than 30% of them.

Items that behave the same way

The 6 items below are the closest match to this item by storage behavior, running 4 days to 6 days and bracketing its 5 days.

• Leftoverskeeps 3 days in the fridgewith meat, fish, poultry, or egg
• Cooked ricekeeps 4 days in the fridge
• Fruit, cutkeeps 4 days in the fridge once opened
• Guacamolekeeps 3 days in the fridge
• Main dishes or meals, hot or refrigeratedkeeps 3 days sealed in the fridge
• Chicken saladkeeps 3 days in the fridge

Products the USDA rates in the same places

This is a common shape of record: 22 of the 466 products are rated in the same places, refrigerator, and 8 of the nine slots are left blank on all of them. Sorted by how close their windows are to this one, the nearest are Potato salad, Apricots and Pasta salad, and the rest of that group is what the list below draws on. Of the 8 shown, 1 keeps longer than this one. The longest-keeping of them is Kiwi fruit at 6 days. Counted more loosely, by which of the three places are rated at all, 64 products match this one.

• Potato salad3 days in the fridge
• Apricots2 days in the fridge
• Pasta salad3 days in the fridge
• Egg salad3 days in the fridge
• Casseroles3 days in the fridge
• Avocados3 days in the fridge
• Guava2 days in the fridge
• Kiwi fruit3 days in the fridge

The rest of the Deli & Prepared Foods shelf

The USDA puts this product on the Deli & Prepared Foods shelf together with 24 others, and 7 of them keep longer outside the freezer. The shelf runs from Olives at 18 months down to Pate at 2 days. Nearest this product by window are Cooked pasta, Potato salad and Pasta salad, which is the order the list below is printed in. The order counts the longest window outside the freezer, so this item sits here at 5 days rather than at the 3 days in the fridge its own answer prints.

• Cooked pasta5 days3 days in the fridge
• Potato salad5 days3 days in the fridge
• Pasta salad5 days3 days in the fridge
• Poultry pieces4 days3 days in the fridge
• Leftovers4 days3 days in the fridge
• Cooked rice6 days4 days in the fridge
• Fruit, cut4 days4 days in the fridge once opened
• Guacamole4 days3 days in the fridge

If it has to keep longer than this

If it has to keep longer than 5 days, the Deli & Prepared Foods aisle gives 6 products that hold at least twice as long outside the freezer. The smallest step up is Commercial brand vacuum-packed dinners at 2 weeks against this one's 5 days; after it come Luncheon meat or poultry, Salami and Canadian bacon. They are printed below in the order the step gets bigger, not alphabetically. In the other direction, 1 entry in the category keeps half as long or less, Pate among them.

• Commercial brand vacuum-packed dinners2 weeks2 weeks sealed in the fridge
• Luncheon meat or poultry2 weeks3 days in the fridge once opened
• Salami2 weeks3 days in the fridge once opened
• Canadian bacon80 days10 days in the fridge
• Hummus3 months7 days in the fridge once opened
• Olives18 months2 weeks in the fridge once opened

The record this page is built from

This page is built from a single FoodKeeper row, record 603 — the source’s own number for it, not a position — one of the 661 rows in the snapshot. That row fills 1 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. 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

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: coleslaw, homemade, homemade coleslaw, prepared, prepared coleslaw

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.