Have you ever opened your fridge to find a storage container got pushed to the back of the fridge and you are now trying to remember what’s in the container? Don’t deny it. It happens to the best of us. You find yourself at a crossroad in trying to decide whether to risk your life and investigate what’s in the container or to just throw the whole thing in the trash. You begin to rationalize in your head your best course of action. Is it safe to open? Am I going to pass out from the smell? It’s the red container and I remember washing that on Monday, I think, so it can’t be more than a couple of days old right?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could take all the guess work out of food storage?
The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service along with Cornell University and the Food Marketing Institute created an application, the FoodKeeper. The application was launched in April 2015 with the goal to help consumers maintain the safety, freshness and quality of foods.
The FoodKeeper application offers more than 400+ food and beverage items and their storage advice. Some of the types include baby food, dairy products and eggs, poultry, produce and more.
With the FoodKeeper app, you can:
- Find specific storage timelines
- Get cooking tips
- Syncs with device’s calendar to remind to use food before it may spoil
- Submit a question using ‘Ask Karen’, the USDA’s 24/7 food safety hotline
- Submit items not in the database to be considered in an update
The suggested storage times are to be used as guidelines. Some foods may spoil more quickly while others might last longer than the suggested times. The app was recently updated last month to include food storage information in both Spanish and Portuguese, the ability to display temperatures, and weights and measures in Imperial or Metric units. More updates will be coming in September to include recalls and educational videos.
The application is available for Android and Apple devices and has been downloaded more than 100,00 times. Don’t have a smartphone/tablet? That’s not a problem. You can access the FoodKeeper App online here. Are you more of a paper person and would rather print off a hard copy? You can find our Fact Sheets on freezer storage, refrigerator storage, pantry food storage and many more others can be found on Ohioline.
