My canned bean stash went from 15 years to 2 months after I forgot about rotation

I started prepping back in 2018 and bought 300 cans of mixed beans from a bulk store in Denver. Stacked them in my basement and felt like a genius. Fast forward to last week when I grabbed a can for chili and the lid was bulging. Opened it and it smelled like a dead animal. Turns out I had cans from 2013 mixed in with the newer ones and the whole system was trash. I spent the weekend pulling every single can, checking dates, and organizing by year. Now I have maybe 60 cans that are actually good and a new rotation method I stole from a grocery store. I wrote the purchase date on the top with a sharpie and put the newest in back. Anyone else learn this lesson the hard way after a big stockpile?

2 comments

2 Comments

laura18914d ago

I read somewhere that canned goods from before 2015 are way more likely to fail because the lining technology changed. That bulging lid tricked me too once, now I just do the sharpie trick and check dates twice a year. Your grocery store method is solid, keeping the oldest stuff up front saves a lot of wasted food and money.

joel60314d ago

Sure, I thought I had a sixth sense for bad cans after that one exploded in my pantry. Turns out my sixth sense was just a bad habit of trusting my eyeballs over the calendar. Now I treat every dented can like a ticking time bomb and name them all "Bruce.