This paper deals with the inventory control of perishable products having a fixed lifetime. In the first part of the paper, we review the relevant literature on the problem of determining appropriate ordering policies for fixed life perishable inventory. Then, we propose a continuous review inventory policy; i.e. an (r, Q) policy, extending an earlier investigation (i.e. Chiu, 1995). Expressions of the different components of the expected total cost are derived and the problem of finding the optimal replenishment level r and the optimal incoming quantity Q is formulated. A comparative numerical study shows that the model we propose significantly outperforms the classical (r, Q) policy and Chiu's model.