I tested 3 methods to keep salad fresh for longer in the fridge — here’s which worked best

So, you bought a bag of salad and it’s wilted within a week — what gives?

It’s a tale as old as time — or, since the inception of bagged lettuce — that has frustrated health-conscious grocery shoppers. But one man might have discovered a guaranteed way to keep your mixed greens fresh.

Gavin Wren, a UK-based food policy consultant and content creator, experimented with three bags of lettuce with the same batch number, detailing the process in a viral TikTok video this week.

He began by placing the contents of each into three different glass containers: one without a lid, another with an air-tight seal and, in the third, Wren rinsed and spun the lettuce, placing paper towels under and on top of the lettuce in the air-tight container.

“Salad actually benefits from being kept airtight,” he said in the clip, explaining that moisture “is one of the things that makes food go off quicker.”

For 11 days, Wren filmed the three containers of lettuce inside the fridge with a GoPro, posting the time-lapse footage online.

Within the first day, the lettuce without a lid had already begun to wilt, and by day three, it had already deflated to half the size of the other two mounds of lettuce. Meanwhile, the lettuce with a lid but no paper towels had also begun to shrivel, albeit much less than the lidless container.

Shockingly, the glass canister containing the lettuce with paper towels still appeared crisp even after a week, while the other two withered — although, it would likely “offend anyone” who was served week-old lettuce, Wren noted.

“9 days??? Mine barely makes it back from the supermarket,” lamented one viewer in the comments.

“You should’ve left one in the bag like most of us do,” suggested another.

“I always put kitchen roll in the bag and it does helps hugely. Same with spinach in a bag,” someone else wrote.