What it does
Search or browse 651 foods across fourteen categories — Baby, Dairy & Eggs, Meat, Poultry, Deli & Prepared, Seafood, Veg Proteins, Baked Goods, Grains & Pasta, Produce, Frozen Aisle, Condiments & Canned, Shelf-Stable, and Beverages. Every entry lays out its pantry, fridge, and freezer windows side by side, with the qualifiers the source itself attaches ("after opening," "after thawing"). Search speaks your vocabulary: 584 entries carry the alias keywords that ship inside the federal data, so typing "chicken leftovers" still finds cooked chicken. The browse list shows the first sixty foods alphabetically; the search box reaches the entire library. Tap "I stored this today" — or dial in the date you actually stored it — and the food joins your My countdown dashboard: days left until its window ends, or how far past it is, sorted most urgent first, one tap to clear. Your six most recent lookups stay pinned along the top so a repeat question is one tap, and the stored dates work offline — every calculation happens inside the page.
Where the numbers come from
The library is the USDA/FSIS FoodKeeper product table — the same dataset that powers the official FoodKeeper widget on foodsafety.gov — fetched on November 7, 2026, pinned by checksum, and shipped inside the site so the page needs no network to answer you. The fetch method, endpoint, and checksum are documented in the data file's own header, and the values were spot-checked against the FSIS Farm to Table pages (cooked chicken: 3 to 4 days in the fridge, 4 months in the freezer — the shipped rows match). The build converts the federal display ranges — "3–4 days," "4 months" — into day counts mechanically: no numbers invented, none adjusted. Ten source products without usable numbers were dropped, which is why 651 shipped out of 661. Where the source gives a range longer than three years, the table displays it capped at three years with the original range preserved in the note; windows the source calls indefinite are marked "indefinite per source." The primary sources are USDA FSIS FoodKeeper guidance via foodsafety.gov, cross-checked against fsis.usda.gov.
How the countdown works
Each food counts down against the window that governs it: its fridge window if it has one, otherwise its pantry window, and only foods that store frozen alone count down against their freezer window. Three rules produce the verdict. Inside the window: EAT, with the days left printed. Window ended, but you're within thirty days of storing and the food has a freezer window: FREEZE IT — you're in the rescue window, so move it to the freezer before it closes. Past that: TOSS. If you enter a stored date that hasn't happened yet, the app treats it as today and says so rather than guessing. The verdict is deliberately one word, big type — no advice paragraph to wade through over a container of soup.
The truth in the name
Here is the distinction this whole tool is built on. Fridge and pantry windows are the ones that bite: miss them and the countdown gets urgent. Freezer windows are estimates of quality, not verdicts of safety. The federal data marks it that way — the table prints "quality only" next to freezer rows — because of a fact USDA states plainly: food kept constantly frozen at 0 °F stays safe indefinitely. What fades over time is quality — texture, flavor, color — not safety. So when a frozen casserole's countdown runs out, TOSS means "this has stopped being good," not "this is dangerous." What no countdown can see: your freezer's real temperature, the power cut last February, how long the takeout sat in the car. That's why the source's own rule is printed in the footer — guidance ranges, not law; when in doubt, throw it out. Your nose and eyes still get the final vote.
Who made it
Freezer Truth is made by Grizzly at Kodiak Foundry LLC, a one-person studio in Florida that builds free web tools for the questions nobody hands you a manual for — the rest of the fleet is at kodiakfoundry.com.
Say hello
Tool requests, data corrections, or a verdict you'd like to argue with: hello@kodiakfoundry.com. A real person reads every message.