Can You Freeze A Costco Pumpkin Pie For Later?

For pumpkin pie lovers, a perfect slice may be a once-a-year experience, which means the stakes are high for it to be flawless. And for Costco fans, that may mean that it comes from only one source: the warehouse store's beloved bakery. 

Maybe that's thanks to Costco's loyalty to a particular variety of pumpkin or some other kind of Kirkland brand magic, but this pie's popularity has made getting a hold of one on the week of a holiday a major challenge. Hours-long lines have been reported in some cases, which isn't exactly convenient if you need to be at home preparing a multi-course meal — or even simply handling a standard holiday to-do list. The soundest strategy for avoiding the chaos of last-minute pie purchasing is to shop early, but that can compromise freshness. 

This raises the critical question, can you freeze your Costco pumpkin pie? And thankfully, the answer is yes. There may be clever secret ingredients for an easy no-bake pumpkin pie and plenty of mistakes to avoid when making one from scratch for the holidays, but by ensuring that you have the process down pat for freezing your pie, you can avoid the biggest faux pas.

Freezing your Costco pie is totally possible, and the process requires only a few easy steps. Remove the pie from its plastic shell package and encase it well in multiple layers of plastic wrap (the goal is to prevent air from reaching the surface of your prized purchase). For added protection, a layer of aluminum foil or a handy freezer-friendly round pie container are both fortifying. 

It may be useful to know that you can also freeze a homemade pie, too, just be sure that it's entirely cool before you do the work of wrapping it up. It also helps to opt for the type of aluminum pie pan you'll find with the store-bought kind, since it'll be more efficient from a freezing perspective than a reusable one and less likely to allow freezer burn to develop.

Either way, it's critical that you put this into practice pretty quickly, as freshness matters not only for quality, but food safety, too. A couple of months will be the upper limit for the length of time you want to leave your Costco pumpkin pie in the icebox. Once you're ready to enjoy the pie of your dreams, all you need is a little more patience; thawing it on the counter may be faster, but it'll compromise the crust. Instead, give it about eight to 12 hours in the fridge, and then prepare to have the pie you've been dreaming about all year long.