Where Should You Be Keeping Your Ketchup? You Might Be Surprised By What Experts Say.

Ketchup is reportedly found in 97% of American homes, but where in the home should it be kept?

Can it be stored in the pantry after it’s been opened? Or does it need to stay in the refrigerator in between trips to the dining room table? And if it should be in the fridge, why do restaurants leave it out?

Those are just a few of the questions that we — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, the co-hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — posed to Kristen Aiken, HuffPost’s editorial director of Life and Commerce, when she recently stopped by to chat about keeping leftovers out of the danger zone.

“There was a huge debate over this a few years ago, and Heinz had to tweet out and explain themselves, but basically, in a restaurant, it’s different than at home, because the turnover is so fast,” Aiken said. “They’ll go through a bottle in a day, maybe, with so many people squirting it on their food.”

But even if you aren’t serving hundreds of guests a day, your ketchup would likely do just fine in the cupboard.

“Heinz, for example, is shelf-stable. You should be able to keep it not refrigerated for a long time. However, [because of specific factors that may vary from home to home like] the temperature of your room or certain storage conditions, they recommend that you refrigerate it after you open it [to maintain quality]. But it really is meant to be shelf-stable.”

That’s thanks to the product’s high level of acidity. However, other brands and homemade ketchup may not have the same acidity level and may need to be handled differently.

“There are all these new fancy ketchup brands that are organic, and they probably are not as shelf-stable, so you just have to read the label,” Aiken advised.

Heinz UK responded to this