How long doPieslast?

The USDA rates 3 kinds of this separately

The USDA files 3 separate entries under this name — mincemeat, pecan and pumpkin — and they do not keep for the same time: Pies, pecan holds 3 days to 4 days outside the freezer, Pies, mincemeat holds 1 week. No one of the 3 is the kind the plain name means, so this page prints no single figure: the kinds are listed with their own windows and you pick yours.

The shortest of these, Pies, mincemeat at 2 hours, is a safety limit, and past it the food goes out untasted.

Every storage figure the USDA publishes for this item

All three places the USDA recognizes are rated here — pantry, refrigerator and freezer — which only 65 of the 466 foods in the data manage. The source also indexes it as mincemeat, meat, mince and pecan.

Pies, mincemeat

• In the freezer8 months
• In the pantry2 hours
• Once opened · in the fridge1 week

Pies, pecan

• In the freezer1 month to 2 months
• In the pantry2 hours
• Once opened · in the fridge3 days to 4 days

Pies, pumpkin

• In the freezer1 month to 2 months
• In the pantry2 hours
• Once opened · in the fridge3 days to 4 days

Why this page prints no multiplier against the room-temperature figure

The USDA's figure in the pantry for all 3 kinds listed here is 2 hours, and 2 hours is a limit on standing at room temperature rather than a window for storing it. No multiplier is printed on this page at all. A ratio whose denominator is a safety limit turns a danger-zone rule into a benefit, and there is no second window here to divide by instead.

Turning the range into a date

Each kind gets its own dated rows here, 6 rows across the 3 the USDA lists under this name, because a date is only worth printing against the window it belongs to.

Pies, mincemeat

• In the freezerUse by8 months after the day you stored it
• In the pantry2 hours, and no date will help: it is shorter than a day
• Once opened · in the fridgeUse by1 week after the day you opened it

Pies, pecan

• In the freezerUse by1 month to 2 months after the day you stored it
• In the pantry2 hours, and no date will help: it is shorter than a day
• Once opened · in the fridgeUse by3 days to 4 days after the day you opened it

Pies, pumpkin

• In the freezerUse by1 month to 2 months after the day you stored it
• In the pantry2 hours, and no date will help: it is shorter than a day
• Once opened · in the fridgeUse by3 days to 4 days after the day you opened it

It is past the date. Now what?

Say the 2 hours the USDA allows in the pantry has run out, or the dish sat on the counter overnight. That is the clock running while food stands in a warm kitchen, not a shelf life. 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.

Below a day the USDA is not printing a shelf life but a limit on standing in a warm kitchen, and that holds wherever the figure sits. 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. Freezing stops the clock but does not turn it back: food already past its window is not rescued by putting it in the freezer. 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.

Items that behave the same way

Pies carries no single window to compare — its 3 kinds each keep their own — so these 6 are simply what the USDA rates on the same shelf, shortest first: Doughnuts at 2 days through Cinnamon rolls at 3 days.

• Doughnutskeeps 1 day sealed in the pantryup to 2 days in the fridge once opened
• Chiffon pies, chocolate, lemonkeeps 1 day in the fridge once opened
• Bagelkeeps 1 day in the pantryfresh baked
• Macaroons, frenchkeeps 1 day in the pantry
• Dairy filled eclairskeeps 2 days in the fridge once opened
• Cinnamon rollskeeps 1 day in the pantrybaked

Products the USDA rates in the same places

Only 3 other products in the whole file carry the same set of rated places as this one, freezer, pantry and refrigerator after opening: Fruit pies, Quiche and Anchovies. That is 3 products out of 466, which makes this a rare shape of record rather than a common one, and it is worth knowing that the comparison below is drawn from a very small group. The longest-keeping of them is Anchovies at 5 years. Counted more loosely, by which of the three places are rated at all, 65 products match this one.

• Fruit pies1 day in the pantryup to 1 week in the fridge once opened
• Quiche3 days in the fridge once opened
• Anchovies3 days in the fridge once openedup to 5 years in the pantry

Closest by shape, but not an exact match — they share most of these places, not all of them.

• Bagel1 day in the pantryfresh baked
• Muffin3 days in the pantrycommercially packaged
• Whole wheat flour2 years in the fridge
• Macaroons1 day in the pantry
• Yeast4 months in the fridge once openedup to 2 years sealed in the pantry

The record this page is built from

The USDA publishes 3 separate rows under this name — records 208, 209 and 210 — and this page carries all of them rather than picking one, because their windows differ. Between them they fill 3 of the nine storage slots with a time. No one of the 3 is the kind the plain name means, so this page prints no single figure: the kinds are listed with their own windows and you pick yours. The same record answers to mincemeat, meat, mince and pecan in the source's own index.

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: meat, mince, mincemeat, pecan, pie, pumpkin

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.