How Long Can You Keep Fruitcake, Assuming That You Actually Want It?

A fruitcake found in Antarctica kept for 106 Years

You can keep a fruitcake for up to one month in the pantry, for up to six months in the refrigerator, and for up to one year in the freezer, assuming that you actually want to eat the fruitcake at some point. (Photo: Burke/Triolo Productions/Getty)

Usually when keeping food around, you should draw the line at 100 years. In fact, many types of food won’t keep for longer than a week. Fruitcakes, though, with their seemingly industrial-strength consistency may appear to be an exception. Just think back to 2017, when news emerged about a fruitcake looking edible after sitting in Cape Adare, Antarctica, for 106 years. This doesn’t mean that fruitcakes are the Keith Richards of food items, though. There are limits as to how long you can keep these weapons of mass digestion.  

The Cape Adare fruitcake was a special one, as I reported for Forbes back in 2017. Members of the Antarctic Heritage Trust made this presumably nutty discovery when they found something in a hut wrapped in paper inside a rotting container. Most likely, explorer Robert Falcon Scott's team had left the fruitcake there during their Terra Nova expedition in 1911 to the South Pole, which shows that the history of people not wanting fruitcakes dates at least as far back as the early 1900s. In 2017, Mike Moffitt in an SFGATE article quoted the Trust’s program manager Lizzie Meeks as saying, “There was a very, very slight rancid butter smell to it, but other than that, the cake looked and smelled edible.” Umm, OK. But the word “rancid” is not something that you typically see on a restaurant menu that makes you go, “I want some of that.”

Let’s assume that 106 years is the exception rather than the rule. How long then can you keep that fruitcake that your friends may or may not have re-gifted to you? Well, as I wrote in my 2017 Forbes article, the U.S. Department for Agriculture (USDA) had indicated that you can keep a fruitcake for up to one month in the pantry with the possibility of extending this to six months if you keep the fruitcake refrigerated and one year if you keep it frozen. Not surprisingly, these numbers are similar to how long you can keep dried fruit. Now, the USDA did not specify how long you might keep a fruitcake in the head of a rocket, just in case you want to launch the fruitcake into space.  

The viable lifetime of your fruitcake does depend on what you do with it. You can end up contaminating your cake with even more microorganisms by letting it touch your unwashed hands or whatever other filthy parts of your body you may put on the fruitcake. Introducing more microorganisms can shorten how long you can keep your fruitcake. So, make sure that you wash your hands frequently and thoroughly whenever handling your fruitcake. That’s not a euphemism, by the way. And for Pete’s sake, don’t involve your fruitcake in all of your Holiday activities, whatever they may be.

As is the case with some of those other, ahem, more private Holidays activities, it does matter how wet everything is. A more moist fruitcake will allow microorganisms to more readily reproduce. So, if you want to keep your fruitcake longer, keep it as dry as possible.

One exception is alcohol. Alcohol can help retard the growth of mold and other bad stuff. Some brandied fruitcakes have remained edible for years, even as long as 20 years.

Of course, a fruitcake may last for 20 years simply because no one wants to eat it. If you are not a fan of fruitcakes then the “Best By” date for a fruitcake may end up being never.