About StillGood?

Why this site exists

The information needed to answer "is this still good?" is already public. The USDA, the FDA, FoodSafety.gov, and the CDC publish detailed, careful, well-researched cold-storage guidance, and all of it is free.

The problem is shape, not availability. That guidance lives in PDF tables, in a mobile app, and in long explainer pages that bury the number you need under several paragraphs of preamble. None of it is built for someone standing at a fridge with one hand full, deciding in the next ten seconds whether to eat something or bin it.

StillGood? is a re-presentation layer. We take the same federal numbers and put them where you can act on them: the answer first, the fridge and freezer windows next, then the context that helps you judge the cases the tables do not cover.

What we actually add

We want to be honest about this, because "we reformatted a government table" is not by itself worth your time. On each of our 155 food pages we add four things the source tables do not give you:

• Storage technique. A published storage window assumes ideal conditions. The number for chicken assumes a fridge at or below 40°F and the meat on the bottom shelf. We tell you the conditions the number depends on, because that is usually where a home kitchen diverges from the lab.
• Spoilage mechanism. Knowing why something goes bad tells you how to read a borderline case. Food that spoils by bacterial growth behaves very differently from food that spoils by oxidation or moisture loss, and only one of those categories is dangerous.
• The safety-versus-quality line. This is the distinction most food content collapses, and it causes an enormous amount of unnecessary waste. Freezer burn is ugly and harmless. A bulging can is a medical emergency. We separate these explicitly on every page.
• Date-label translation. "Sell by," "best by," and "use by" mean three different things, and with one exception none of them is a safety deadline. We explain what the printed date on that specific product is actually telling you.

What we will not do

We do not publish a duration we cannot trace to a federal source. When our sources disagree or go silent on a food, we say so on the page rather than inventing a number that looks authoritative. Guessing here has real consequences, so we would rather have a visible gap than a confident fabrication.

We also do not push you toward eating something marginal. Every page ends at the same place the USDA does: when in doubt, throw it out. A few dollars of food is not worth a foodborne illness, and any site that encourages you to stretch a window to save a container of leftovers has its incentives pointed the wrong way.

Read our editorial policy for how entries are researched, reviewed, and corrected.

Who builds it

StillGood? is published by Sean Bernath, who owns the site, decides what it claims, and is accountable for correcting it. It is independent, with no sponsorship from or affiliation with any food producer, retailer, appliance manufacturer, or trade association. No entry has ever been paid for, and no brand has editorial input into what appears here.

The pages are drafted with AI assistance, working from the public federal documents cited on each one. We say so plainly here, on every relevant page, and in our editorial policy, because a byline that implies otherwise would be the first dishonest thing on a site built around being checkable.

That is also why the sourcing matters more here than the authorship does. Every duration links the specific government document behind it, so you are never asked to trust how a page was written — you can open the source and verify the number yourself. Reported errors are checked against the primary document by a person before anything changes.

No one here is a doctor, dietitian, or food scientist, and the site does not pretend otherwise. If you need medical advice about a foodborne illness, contact a healthcare provider or your local health department, not a website.

How it is funded

The site is supported by display advertising. Advertisers have no say in our content, no advance view of what we publish, and no ability to change a storage duration. We do not run sponsored posts or affiliate links in our food entries, so we have no financial reason to send you toward buying anything.

See our privacy policy for what advertising means for your data, including how to opt out of personalized ads.

Coverage

We currently cover 155 foods across 6 categories: meat & poultry , seafood , dairy & eggs , leftovers & cooked food , produce , and pantry & condiments . We expand the catalog based on what people actually search for and cannot find, so if you looked something up here and came away empty-handed, that is genuinely useful to know — tell us.