How Long Wellsley Farms Pantry Staples Keep: Rice, Oil, Honey, Salt and Cans

Club sizes are sold on arithmetic. The big bag costs less by the ounce, so the big bag is the better buy. That holds only if you use the food before it fades. A cheap ounce you throw away has cost you the full price.

Set the size of each Wellsley Farms staple against the time it keeps, and the answer changes from food to food. The storage times come from FoodKeeper, the data set that the U.S. Department of Agriculture publishes for exactly this question.

The table gives two times for each food. The first is how long the unopened pack keeps in a pantry from the day you buy it. The second is what changes once the seal is broken.

These are quality times, not safety deadlines. Food past them is usually safe and tastes worse. The data set is plain about this for canned goods, and the same logic runs through the dry goods.

The spread in that table is the whole lesson. Vinegar, honey and white rice give you two years. Brown rice gives you one. Dried fruit gives you six months. A pack size that is sensible for one is reckless for another.

The 25 lb bag of Thai Hom Mali Jasmine Rice is the heaviest pack in the catalog. FoodKeeper gives white rice 2 years in the pantry. The grain is dry and stable, and in a sealed bin it will outlast most households' patience.

So the question for the 25 lb bag is pace, not spoilage. The bag holds 400 oz. A family that cooks 8 oz of dry rice a night, about four servings, empties it in 50 nights. A couple cooking 4 oz three times a week needs 33 weeks, which is still inside the two years.

Brown rice is another matter. It keeps its bran, and the bran holds oil that turns stale. FoodKeeper gives it 1 year, half the time of white. That is why the organic brown rice comes in a 5 lb bag and not in a 25 lb sack. At 8 oz a night the bag lasts 10 nights.

Quinoa sits with white rice on the long side: 2 to 3 years uncooked. The 3 lb bag is a modest pack for a food that patient.

Oil is where a club size needs the most thought. FoodKeeper gives olive and vegetable oils 6 to 12 months unopened and 4 months once opened. The 2 L bottle of Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil carries its own advice on the label: use within six months of opening, and store away from light.

Two litres is 67.6 fl oz. To finish that in four months you need to pour about 4.0 fl oz a week, which is roughly 8 tablespoons. A kitchen that cooks dinner in olive oil every night does that without trying. A kitchen that uses it for the odd salad does not, and should buy a smaller bottle.

Coconut oil is the patient one. The data gives it 3 years in the pantry and advises against the refrigerator, because cold makes it too hard to scoop. A 56 fl oz tub can sit in a cupboard through a long run of baking.

Sprays last too: 2 years for vegetable oil sprays, and the same for avocado oil. The can keeps air away from the oil, which is half the reason it keeps.

Vinegar barely has a clock. FoodKeeper lists 2 years, and the acid protects it well beyond that. A gallon is 128 fl oz, enough for a season of pickling with some left for the kettle and the windows.

Honey is the food people worry about most and need to worry about least. FoodKeeper lists 2 years for quality. The National Honey Board, the industry's promotion and research board, explains why the figure is soft.

The complaint buyers make about honey is that it went solid. That is crystallization, and it is no fault in the jar.

Raw honey sets sooner than strained honey, because the fine particles in it give the crystals somewhere to start. Stand the bottle in warm water and stir, and it runs again. FoodKeeper files honey under pantry foods, so a cupboard with the cap on tight is the place for it.

One rule about honey is firm, and it concerns babies.

Maple syrup has two clocks. In an unopened plastic jug FoodKeeper gives it 2 years in the pantry. Once opened, syrup keeps 6 months in the refrigerator. A 32 fl oz jug is a quart, and a household that eats pancakes on weekends finishes a quart well inside six months.

Agave syrup has no row of its own in the data. Treat the 44 oz bottle as you would the other syrups: cap on tight, cupboard before opening, and watch for any change in smell.

The data splits peanut butter by recipe. The kind made with stabilizers keeps 6 to 9 months in the pantry, and 3 to 4 months in the refrigerator after opening. The natural kind has no pantry time listed at all: it is a refrigerator food, good for 3 to 4 months once opened.

So the organic jar asks more of you. Stir the oil back in on the first day, then keep it cold. The classic jar forgives a month in a lunch-making cupboard. Neither is wrong. They are different foods with the same name.

Salt has a row in the FoodKeeper data and no time against it. Nothing in plain salt spoils. The same goes for sugar, and here the data adds a note on quality.

That makes the five-pound tub of pink salt and the ten-pound bag of cane sugar the safest club buys in the catalog. The only risk is damp. Keep both sealed and they will see out the decade.

Spices are different. They do not spoil, and they do fade. The data gives ground spices 2 to 3 years, ground cinnamon 3 to 4 years, and dried herbs 1 to 2 years. A restaurant-size shaker of thyme suits a cook who uses thyme every week. For the rest of us it turns into green dust before it is half gone.

Grated Parmesan is the outlier on the shaker shelf. FoodKeeper lists grated Parmesan at 12 months in the refrigerator. Read the shaker's own label for what it asks once the seal is off.

Dried fruit has the shortest time of any dry good here: 6 months in the pantry, and the same again in the refrigerator after opening. Dates get even less in a cupboard, 2 months, and 12 months in the cold.

The bags here run from 20 to 44 oz. A 40 oz bag of dates holds forty one-ounce portions. One person eating a portion a day finishes it in under six weeks, which is fine. One person who bakes with dates twice a year should freeze most of the bag on day one.

Two buyers of the date bag wrote that theirs tasted stale on arrival. Dried fruit is the shelf where the age of the stock shows first, so read the recent reviews before you order, and check the date on the bag when it lands.

Canned chicken is the long-distance runner. FoodKeeper lists canned chicken at 5 years in the pantry, and low-acid canned goods in general at 2 to 5 years. The Premium Chunk Chicken Breast in Water comes in 12.5 oz cans, sold 6 to a pack.

Open a can and the clock collapses to 3 to 4 days in the refrigerator. That is the case for small cans in a multi-pack over one big can: you open what one meal needs and the rest stay sealed.

Marinated vegetables in a jar follow the row for foods in a vinegar-based sauce: 12 to 18 months unopened. Once open they live in the refrigerator, and the marinade should cover what is left.

Snack foods keep for less time than staples, and a household usually eats them faster too. The two tend to cancel out. The exception is the tub nobody likes.

Potato chips have the shortest time in the whole data set that applies here, 2 months. A 20 oz bag is a party purchase. Buy it the week of the party.

Here is the same information turned around. Divide each pack by its pantry time and you get the weekly use that finishes it on schedule. If your kitchen uses less than the last column says, the pack is too big for you.

Most of the numbers in that last column are small. A few ounces of white rice a week is less than one family dinner. That is the honest case for club sizes: for the foods that keep, almost any household uses enough.

The numbers that bite are the oils and the brown rice. Those are the packs to size to your cooking and not to the price tag.

Sort the catalog by its clocks and it falls into three groups. The first group never punishes a big pack. The second rewards one if you cook often. The third wants a plan before you click.

Notice what decides the group. It is fat and moisture. Dry, fat-free foods such as salt, sugar and white rice sit in the first row. Anything with oil in it, from olive oil to the bran on brown rice, moves down. Dried fruit holds enough moisture to move down again.

A low price by the ounce is the trap in the third group. It means little on dried mango if a third of the bag dries out in the cupboard. Work out what you will finish, and price that.

Date every pack when you open it. A strip of tape and a pen do the job. Six months later you will not remember, and the tape will.

Put the new pack behind the old one. Shops call it rotation. At home it means the open bag gets finished before the fresh one is cut.

The staples live on three shelves: rice, grains and oils, baking and spices, and honey, syrup and spreads. Nuts have their own clock, covered in nuts by the ounce, and coffee has another, covered in coffee cost per cup.