A pantry staples list, and how long each keeps

By The Pantry Pro team · 6 September 2026 · Updated 8 September 2026 · 8 min read

A pantry is the part of a kitchen where nothing appears to be happening, which is why it is where forgotten food lives. Nothing in it smells wrong or leaks or announces the day it stopped being worth cooking. Two questions cover most of it: which things are worth keeping on hand, and how long each one holds.

The list, with the times the pantry charts give it

These are Clemson Cooperative Extension's figures, from two charts on one factsheet: the staples from its chart for pantry foods in tightly sealed containers, the canned rows from a second for a cool, dry pantry at 65 to 70°F (Clemson HGIC, Food Storage: Pantry). They are quality times, not safety deadlines: a poor-quality food, and Clemson's example is stale cereal, can be perfectly safe.

Staple	Pantry time
White flour	10 to 15 months
Whole wheat flour	3 months, refrigerated for longer
White rice	1 year
Brown rice	6 months
Dried pasta	1 to 2 years
Cornmeal and grits	12 months
Dried beans and peas	1 year
Cold breakfast cereal	12 months
Granulated sugar	indefinitely
Brown and powdered sugar	18 months
Honey and syrups	1 year
Vegetable oil	1 year
Olive oil	6 months
Shortening	2 years
Peanut butter	3 to 4 months, refrigerated for longer
Nonfat dry milk	1 year
Canned fruit, juice, tomatoes, pickles	12 to 18 months
Canned vegetables and meat	2 to 5 years
Home-canned food	1 year
Ground spices and herbs	2 to 3 years
Whole spices	4 to 5 years
Salt and cream of tartar	indefinitely
Vinegar and Worcestershire sauce	30 months
Nuts in the shell	6 to 12 months

Choose the staples your household actually uses

Twenty-four rows is a menu rather than a shopping order. The list worth keeping is the five foods your kitchen actually ran on this month, each with how much of it is in the house right now.

In Pantry Pro, packaged goods go in from the Scan tab by barcode, decoded on the phone; flour out of a bin is typed in. A scan asks How many and Where; the unit and any package date are set on the row afterwards, because a barcode does not carry a date.

Every one of those numbers assumes a room

The charts' conditions do as much work as their foods. Clemson puts canned goods at 50 to 70°F, away from hot pipes, a range or furnace, and notes that storage time drops sharply above 75°F (Clemson HGIC, Safety of Stored Foods).

Utah State University Extension sets the same range from the other end: keep the storage area above 32°F and below 70°F, because the cooler it is, the longer quality and nutrients last (USU Extension, Food Storage in Home). Humidity should be low, since dried food that picks up moisture grows mold, and sunlight damages food and packaging alike.

The size of that effect is easy to underrate. USU cites a Brigham Young University comparison in which wheat held acceptable quality for 25 years in a cold basement and 5 years in a hot garage or attic (USU Extension, Food Storage Conditions): same wheat, same packaging, five times the life. The National Center for Home Food Preservation shows the same slope on a shorter scale, allowing most dried fruit a year at 60°F and six months at 80°F (NCHFP, Packaging and Storing Dried Foods).

Indefinitely describes safety, not usefulness

Sugar and salt are the entries the chart declines to number. USU explains why for sugar: commercial sugars — granular, syrup and honey alike — have an indefinite shelf life because they resist microbial growth. The same page still suggests using them within about two years, for quality (USU Extension, Storing Sugars). What ends a bag is moisture rather than spoilage, and USU says there is no easy way to restore a hardened one.

Baking powder shows the distinction at its sharpest. USU gives it an indefinite shelf life when kept free of moisture and contamination, a best-if-used-by date of 18 to 24 months, a BYU study that found samples still functional after 29 years in their original cans, and about six months once opened (USU Extension, Cooking Food Storage). Those answer different questions: the tin will not hurt anyone, and whether the cake still rises is settled by USU's warm-water test.

The short-dated staples are the whole-grain ones

Whole wheat flour gets three months on the Clemson chart against ten to fifteen for white, and USU's household table is harsher still: at 70°F in a sealed container, one year for white enriched flour and two weeks for whole wheat graham flour. Brown rice gets six months where white rice gets a year.

The reason is the germ. USU explains that milling cracked or whole wheat breaks the membranes holding the oil in the germ apart from the iron and other minerals in the grain, and rancidity sets in rapidly; unbroken wheat berries, on the same page, are given 25 years. The practical version: whole-grain flours and meals belong in the refrigerator, which is what Clemson's chart recommends.

Rice has three different right answers

Clemson gives rice a year in the pantry. USU's household table gives dried rice two years in a sealed container at 70°F. Neither is a package-and-room story: both describe sealed containers at about the same temperature, and two extension services picked different conservative numbers.

The third answer belongs to a colder room. USU's long-term storage research gives properly sealed polished white rice 25 to 30 years, caps rice with oxygen absorbers at 10 years at a constant 70°F, and asks that an opened container be used within one to two years (USU Extension, Storing White Rice).

Old beans get harder, not dangerous

Dry beans keep well and fail slowly. USU's bulletin asks for a tightly covered container in a dry, cool place at 50 to 70°F, with quality good for several months (USU Extension FN 207, Dry Beans and Peas); its household table gives beans, peas and lentils twelve months at 70°F.

Age shows up at the stove rather than in the bag: older beans need longer soaking, and while most tenderize in two to four hours of simmering, long-stored ones take longer.

Cans have two shelf lives, and acid decides which

Clemson splits the canned aisle roughly in half: twelve to eighteen months for canned fruit, juice, tomatoes and pickles, two to five years for canned vegetables and meat. USU explains the split — high-acid foods usually have a shorter shelf life than low-acid ones — and puts a commercial can's code date at typically two to five years from manufacture (USU Extension, Storing Canned Goods). Canned tomatoes are not a worse product than canned green beans, only a more acidic one.

USU draws the safety line wider than the quality line: a commercially canned food in metal or glass stays safe while the seal is unbroken.

Home-canned jars are a shorter story. That same center puts them at 50 to 70°F, away from hot pipes, ranges, furnaces, uninsulated attics and direct sunlight, and advises canning no more than a year's worth unless a specific food's directions say otherwise (NCHFP, Storing Home Canned Foods). Stored warm, the center warns, food loses quality in weeks or months and may spoil outright.

Keeping the five you chose in stock

Staple has meant the everyday thing so far: a food you keep on hand. Keeping one in stock is a number and a habit: pick the level you want to re-buy at, then read the whole set on the same day each week, before the shopping rather than after.

In Pantry Pro the number is Low stock at, on the item's own sheet beside a Staple — track as present, not measured checkbox that makes recipe checks count the item as present rather than measure it. Rice, worked through: check the box, set the threshold to two bags, and tap Used 1 when one is opened. At two bags rice shows up under Running low on the home screen, and Restock staples adds it to the shopping list. Check the number it wrote. It adds the threshold quantity — one unit where no threshold is set — which is a reminder, not a refill of the shelf. Flag salt and flour that way, not every row in the chart above.

The pantry's real failure is order

Nothing above is much use without a date on the container and some idea of what sits behind the front row. Clemson's whole procedure for a pantry is four words — first in, first out — a rule about sequence rather than shelf life; why it works is first in, first out at home.

The printed date on a package answers something other than the chart above does: what date labels on food actually mean. The refrigerator and freezer side, where the numbers run in days rather than years, is how long food really keeps. What a stocked pantry does to a grocery bill is spending less on groceries without coupons.

Set up your household staples

Opens Pantry Pro, which is free to start. It asks you to sign in, or to start a pantry if you do not have one yet.