When stock goes off in storage

What changes in the jar

• Color, driven by light, heat and oxygen.
• Separation, which is slow and gravity-driven.
• Flavor, as acid and aromatics continue to interact.

Storage is a decision, not a leftover

Dark, cool and consistent is the whole requirement and it is cheap at the volumes most makers work at. It is also what gets whatever space is left, which is how a year of work ends up on a shelf by a window or above something that cycles warm.

Keep a retain from every batch

One jar per batch, stored the way a customer would store it, opened on a schedule. It is the only way to learn what your product does across a shelf life without finding out from a customer, and it is the difference between claiming a shelf life and knowing one.

Read it back to the decisions

A storage failure reports on choices made months earlier. Recurring color problems point at the headspace and the glass; recurring separation points at the formulation. The jar opened in November is telling you about the day it was made, which is why the log has to reach that far forward to be worth keeping.

Decide the shelf life before a buyer asks

A wholesale buyer will ask what shelf life you claim, and the answer has to come from retains you actually opened rather than from what is typical for the category. Claiming twelve months because other sauces claim twelve months is a guess with your name on it. Retains convert that into something you can state, and they take a year to accumulate, which is the argument for starting them with the first batch.

Date the retains and store them with the batch code visible. A retain you cannot tie to a batch answers nothing when you open it.

References