The mother of a friend of mine recently passed away. My friend was going through her things, deciding what to keep, what to donate, and what to toss. In one of the kitchen cabinets he found a large bag filled with boxes of Jello (flavored gelatin). They were all stamped with a ridiculously low price, and also stamped with expiration dates of a few years ago. He tossed the bag in the trash.
I’m thinking that Jello really doesn’t expire, that they were stamped with a date because the law requires it. I think he should have tried to donate it to a charity, or short of that, I could use it myself (yes, I would have checked for bugs).
So . . . does Jello actually go bad while still in the box?
I can’t imagine that the gelatin itself is bad in any way. Maybe the flavoring and coloring might have degraded, but that would probably just make it taste… weaker than normal. Personally, if I had any desire for Jello I would keep it and use it. But if you donated it, the charity would probably toss it out of an abundance of caution.
I actually had this happen to me last spring when I ran across 3 boxes of off-brand gelatin in my cupboard. I’d bought them years ago and they’d all been expired for about 18 months. Like the OP I thought “Hey, it’s gelatin. It can’t expire” but just to be safe I poured the first box out into a bowl to check it. Good thing I did, because it was full of dead BUGS!
I don’t know how they got there, nor did I care. Both the box and the paper bag inside were intact as far as I could tell, but I wasn’t taking any chances and just try tossed them all in the trash!
