Tips for Storing Breastmilk

Storing breastmilk appropriately is essential to expand the life and quality of your milk. It’s also essential to do it in an organized fashion to prevent having to waste any! No one wants to throw out their hard work, time, or personal liquid gold.

How long is breastmilk good for?

• Fresh milk is good at room temperature for 4 hours, in the refrigerator for 4 days, and in the deep freezer for up to 1 year.
• Frozen milk can be stored in the deep freezer for up to a year after it was pumped, and is good for 24 hours once thawed in the refrigerator. Please note that once it’s been warmed for baby that it should be used within an hour.

Best Tips for Breastmilk Storage

• Use breastmilk bags- I prefer to use the bags instead of bottles to help save freezer space.
• Lay flat to freeze- find a safe place in your freezer to lay your fresh milk FLAT to freeze. Awkwardly shaped bags take up so much more freezer space because you can’t stack them on top of each other.
• Consider a separate deep freezer- I don’t know about you guys, but my freezer is always super full. I was struggling to find room for my milk, and being a germaphobe, I was weirded out about storing my baby’s milk next to raw meat and other things kept in our freezer. So, we purchased a deep freezer for the garage (get whatever size works for you) and I’m so thankful I did. When you’re done with your breastfeeding journey, you’ll then have extra freezer space for other things!
• ALWAYS label your milk with the date and time! You don’t want to accidentally feed your baby expired milk. 🤢
• Use gallon bags to separate- we learned the hard way to divide the milk into large ziplock bags by month. If you have all your bags just thrown in your freezer, you’ll have to dig through them to find what you should use first. We ended up having to throw some milk out that wasn’t used in time. So depressing, don’t do it.

• Label “sick” milk- this was a tip I found online from someone else. When you or your nursing baby is sick, your body makes antibodies to help fight the infection and those antibodies go into your milk. So, if you catch something (covid for example), you can label your bag “covid” with the date and time, and next time baby gets that you can give it. In theory, you’d know there’s antibodies to covid in that particular batch and maybe (just maybe!) that could help baby fight it off. It’s worth a shot at least. 😊

Take care of your milk, you worked hard for it! Your babies will never eat anything so perfect for the rest of their lives!