Every edible runs on two clocks. The food part goes off on one schedule, the THC fades on another, and the date printed on the package was set with the first in mind. (If you searched "how long do edibles last" and wanted the length of the high, that lives in our guide to how long edibles last. This page is about how long they keep.) Our position: an old sealed gummy is a potency problem and an old brownie is a food safety problem, and most of the confusion online comes from treating them as the same question.
Do edibles expire?
Yes, but the date on the package mostly tracks the food. A sealed gummy past its date has usually lost some THC and some chew rather than turned dangerous, while baked goods and opened drinks spoil on the same schedule as any other food in the kitchen. Michigan and Colorado require an expiration or use-by date on licensed edibles. California requires only a packaging date.
USDA's food-dating guidance is blunt about what those words mean on ordinary groceries: a "Best if Used By" date indicates best flavor or quality, and it is not a purchase or safety date. Infant formula is the one federal exception. Cannabis edibles sit outside USDA's jurisdiction, but the logic carries over to the food half of the product, and Wana says roughly the same about its own gummies. Its FAQ answers "Do they expire?" with yes, check the date on the package, and adds that past the date a gummy can go stale or lose some strength but won't spoil.
Can I eat 4 year old edibles?
A sealed four-year-old gummy or hard candy with no mold, no off smell and an intact package is mostly a weaker gummy. On the only long-run storage data that exists, which measured flower, roughly 40% of the THC would be gone. A four-year-old brownie, cookie or opened drink belongs in the bin regardless of its THC.
The number comes from Ross and ElSohly at the University of Mississippi, published in the UN's Bulletin on Narcotics in 1997. They stored dried cannabis flower in closed barrels, in the dark, in an air-conditioned vault held at 20 to 22°C, and tested it once a year. THC fell by 16.6% of its starting value after one year, 26.8% after two, 34.5% after three and 41.4% after four. That is flower in near-ideal storage. Nobody has published an equivalent four-year study on gummies or chocolate that we could find, so the table below is an illustration built on flower data and nothing more:
Run the same arithmetic on price: a 200mg Wyld tin that cost $16 in Michigan would hold something like 117mg after four years at the flower rate. Same $16, a little over half the THC.
Do edibles lose potency over time?
Yes, and steadily: THC oxidizes over time, mainly into CBN, and heat and light speed the reaction up, so an edible loses strength every month it sits instead of all at once on the printed date. On the Ross and ElSohly flower data, about a sixth of the THC is gone after one year. The date on the package does not tell you how much is left.
The temperature effect is large. Work by Turner and colleagues, summarized in the same paper, measured THC disappearing at 3.83% a year at -18°C, 5.38% at 4°C and 6.92% at 22°C, and at 37°C and 50°C the THC was essentially gone. A gummy that spent a July afternoon in a parked car has had a harder life than one in a kitchen drawer, whatever the sticker says. The CBN that forms along the way is no consolation prize, either: Ross and ElSohly note that CBN does not account for all of the THC that disappears, and the amounts are nowhere near the doses studied for sleep (our sleep picks cover what that evidence actually shows).
For a patient, the practical cost is uncertainty. A gummy that worked at 10mg last year and now delivers somewhere around 7 is a different dose, and you cannot see which. The temptation is to eat two. The dosing logic in our dosing guide points the other way: an old edible is an unknown dose, so treat it like a new product, and remember that the first effects take 30 minutes to 2 hours to arrive (the onset window on our duration guide), which is exactly the gap in which people stack a second piece on a first that has not landed yet.
Can old edibles make you sick?
The THC will not, but the food can. Mold, an off smell, a strange texture or a broken seal mean the product goes in the trash, whatever the date says, and USDA says moldy baked goods get discarded whole because porous foods can be contaminated below the surface. Scraping the spot off an infused brownie does not count.
USDA's general rule is that spoiled food develops an off odor, flavor or texture, and once it does, it should not be eaten. USDA also advises against sniffing visibly moldy food, which is worth knowing before you hold a fuzzy cookie up to your nose to investigate. Its mold chart keys on moisture: high-moisture and porous foods get thrown out whole, and even jams and jellies are a discard because the mold can be producing a toxin. A melted and re-set chocolate bar is its own case: the THC is still in there, but as our chocolate ranking explains, nothing guarantees it still sits where the score lines say.
How long do gummies, chocolates and drinks last?
Few brands publish a number, and the ones that do are vague. Smokiez is the only brand we found that gives a figure (a minimum of one year for all its edibles), and nobody we checked publishes a separate figure for chocolate or drinks. Wana and Cann point to the date printed on the package, Kiva prints a storage temperature for its chocolate, and Wyld publishes nothing on shelf life at all. Here is what each brand's own site says, checked October 14, 2026:
Kanha's answer is the most honest bit of packaging copy in the category. Its FAQ fields the question every buyer has asked, "Why is there so much 'air' in the bags?", and the answer is that the air is nitrogen, put there to keep oxygen off the gummies. The slack fill is the shelf-life feature. Kiva's storage range is narrower than it looks: 77°F is a mild spring afternoon, and a car in August blows straight past it.
Format matters for the food clock more than the THC clock. Our gummies versus chocolates comparison covers why gummies tolerate rough handling better, and the drinks versus gummies page covers how beverages are built. A sealed can and a sealed gummy both keep for a long time. An opened can does not.
What do state labels require?
That turns on where the edible was made. Of the three directory states whose rule text we read, Michigan and Colorado make a date mandatory on every licensed edible, and California asks only for the date the product was packaged, with no expiration or use-by date anywhere in its required list:
The Colorado split is the useful one for a reader. An expiration date claims the food is no longer fit to eat; a use-by date claims only that it is past its best. The label tells you which promise the manufacturer chose to make.
How should you store edibles?
Cool, dark, dry and sealed, in the original packaging, locked away from children. Heat and light are what speed THC loss, and the brands that publish storage advice converge on the same instructions: Wana says cool, dry and sealed, Plus says under 75°F and out of direct sunlight, and Kiva prints 68 to 77°F on its bars.
A few specifics that follow from the sources above:
- Keep the original package. It carries the dose per piece, the batch number and whatever date the state requires, which is everything you need to judge an old product later.
- A cupboard beats the car, the windowsill and the shelf above the stove. The flower data shows THC loss climbing with temperature.
- Refrigerate only what the label says to refrigerate, and opened drinks.
- Lock it up. An old edible still carries THC, and most of them look exactly like candy. Accidental pediatric ingestions are the subject of our report on the 25-year poison center study.
This matters now because people are buying ahead of December 11, when the federal hemp ban takes intoxicating hemp gummies off the legal market. Our hemp ban coverage already declines to recommend stockpiling on legal grounds. The shelf-life reason is simpler: on the flower numbers, a two-year stash has lost about a quarter of its THC before the last bag gets opened, and a patient working through it has a dose that drifts lower every month without saying so. For how the THC gets into a gummy in the first place, see how edibles are made.