Above: Used Ball lids. The one on the left clearly shows the groove left by the canning jar. The one on the right was boiled for 20 minutes, which clearly flattened that groove considerably. I picked up this tip boiling lids if you plan to re-use them from the blog A Traditional Life.
Bottom line: Ball lids appear to be widely in-stock at Walmart once again. And Ace Hardware is stocking a new brand of lids, Pur.
I bought a pack of Pur lids, thinking they had to be American-made, based on the lack of country-of-origin information on the packaging.
But after looking into it, my best guess is that I just bought some steeply marked-up Chinese-made canning lids, in packaging that managed to hide the fact that they were made in China.
I’m unhappy about that. If there’s anything worse than getting fooled, it’s getting fooled by somebody you trust. I think I can find somewhere else to buy canning supplies from now on.
Ball lids are once again in stock at Walmart
I’ve been tracking the U.S. shortage of canning lids for a couple of years now. Canning jars are re-usable, but the traditional lids are, in theory, single-use items. If you follow the rules and use normal (single-use) lids, you need a steady supply of new lids to continue to can food at home.
The U.S. canning lid shortage began in the first year of the pandemic (2020). But unlike most other shortages, it persisted right on through 2021. As of my last post on this (G21-053, September 2021) the shortage still had not been resolved. And by “resolved” mean that you still could not buy name-brand American-made single-use wide-mouth canning lids at anything near the pre-pandemic price of about 25 cents each.
Your choices were:
- Buy Chinese-made lids from Amazon, often of dubious quality.
- Buy Chinese-made lids from other sources, many of whom were cagey about exactly where those lids were produced.
- Switch to re-usable lids (e.g., Tattler brand), and change your canning techniques a bit.
- Re-use your Ball or equivalent single-use lids, despite what the rules say.
- Pay roughly three times the pre-pandemic price for name-brand American-made lids off Amazon, and hope that they are the genuine article. If you could find them.
I revisited this issue today and got a pleasant surprise. First, this, from my local Walmart. For quite a long time these weren’t even listed on the website. And now, hey, Ball wide-mouth lids are in stock at my local Walmart again.
Based on that, I decided to do a third round of my “survey of 20 Walmarts”, to get a handle on how lid availability looks nationally. This is based on an unchanging random sample of 20 ZIP codes. I feed them into the Walmart website to check availability of Ball wide-mouth lids in each area. (FWIW, the way I report the results changes over time because the information available on the Walmart website shifts over time.)
Here’s how this shapes up from last year (top two graphs) to today (bottom graph):
Source: Tabulated from the Walmart.com website, for an unchanging list of 20 random ZIP codes.
At the peak of the 2021 shortage, Walmart wouldn’t ship lids to you, and they were out-of-stock in 80% of the stores on my list. Today, those lids were unavailable in just 15% of ZIP codes (i.e., three locations). For the other 85%, you could buy those lids, in some fashion, from some local Walmart. (FWIW, the three zips with no lids were all in cold-climate states (WI, MN, NE), and plausibly Walmart just hasn’t begun shipping lids to those areas yet.)
It’s a little too soon to declare victory. After all, lids came back into stock at my local Warlmart last spring as well (Post G21-013), but the shelves were bare again by the time canning season got going. That said, it’s certainly better to see them on the shelves than not. As of a few weeks ago, they still were not on the shelf at my local Warmart.
I made a Pur poor lid choice at my local Ace Hardware yesterday.
I was in the hardware store yesterday and noticed two things. First, they did not have have Ball wide-mouth lids on the shelf. Second, Ace Hardware seems to be phasing out Ball brand jars and lids in favor of Pur brand.
I’d never heard of Pur, so that caught my eye.
I picked up a pack of wide-mouth lids, and noted that there was no country-of-origin information. I was intrigued, because my understanding is that the only way to sell a foreign-made products legally in the U.S. is to mark the country of origin. (In fact, here’s the law. If it’s imported and for sale, it has to be marked with the country of origin. I’m not a lawyer but the language of the law seems explicit and clear to me.)
And so, if there is no country-of-origin marking, that means it must be made in the U.S. Right? At least, that’s how I understand the law. Well, read on.
At this point, I had to buy them and give them a look-see, because Ball has more-or-less a monopoly on U.S.-made lids. (Ball, Kerr, Golden Harvest, and probably some other brands are all made by the same U.S. conglomerate that bought the use of the Ball name.)
Plus, Ace Hardware is a reputable retailer. At least, that’s been my long-standing experience with my local Ace Hardware. So, I figured, here’s a product on the shelf, no country-of-origin information, to this has to be some new startup producing U.S-made lids, right? Read on.
Here’s where things start to get a little hazy and/or a little weird and/or just outright misleading.
First, Pur ≠ PUR. There’s a famous brand of home water filters called PUR, all caps. Here’s their website. That’s a completely different company from Pur (upper and lower), the purveyor of these mason jars and lids. Here’s their website. And never the twain shall meet. (You can see a more formal description of the entire Pur product line in LinkedIn. There are still no water filters listed, but there is one Chinese address among all the U.S. ones. More on that below.)
So PUR water filters have nothing to do with Pur mason jars. That by itself seems a bit odd. I’d have assumed that you’d get sued if you tried to use the same brand name, just with lower case, for a product that does, in fact, have something to do with the handling of potable liquids. But for whatever reason, PUR and Pur appear to coexist.
Second, the company is just two years old, and yet they have achieved nationwide marketing exposure through the reputable retailer Ace Hardware. The Pur website itself only talks about the 25 years of experience of the owners, and sort of skips over the actual creation date of this company. But their LinkedIn site clearly states that the Pur Health Group was created in 2019. And their actual LLC filing shows that the Pur Health Group was founded in April 2020). Given that I’ve never seen these before, the startup date on their LLC paperwork seems to make sense.
Third, they make mason jars and PPE (personal protective equipment, like face masks and such)? That’s per their LinkedIn profile.
Source: Linked in.
And now it’s all coming together. Check out the incorporation date, think about their product lines, and draw a conclusion:
Source: Opencorporates.com.
Pur Health Group is a pandemic startup, created to take advantage of two pandemic-related shortages: PPE and canning supplies. (Apparently, at least one of the founders has some long-term association with home canning.) That is an odd combination, to say the least.
I came across a bunch of these pandemic startups as I was searching for lids. Little pop-up companies that started marketing jars and lids in response to the pandemic shortage. Most market them as if they were U.S.-made, but they never actually say where there lids come from. They just give them a nice U.S-sounding name, along the lines of “Original Mason” or “Maverick” or such, package them with a lot of red, white, and blue, and hope you come to the wrong conclusion.
You have to dig around to figure out that all they are doing is marketing the same Chinese-made lids you can find on Amazon. They’re just being very quiet about the fact that they are not U.S.-made. And, in 2020 at least, we knew they couldn’t be U.S.-made because the only U.S. lid manufacture — Ball and associated brands — was plain flat sold out and manufacturing as fast as they could.
What separates this two-year-old canning-supply-marketing startup from the rest is that they’ve hit the big time. They are being marketed in Ace Hardware stores. A place where I’d never even think to question country-of-original information, or lack thereof.
Who are these guys?
In this section, I’m trying to ferret out just exactly where Pur (not PUR) canning lids are made. To be honest, I can’t tell, with absolute certainty. There’s no place I can find that explicitly tells where their lids come from. But I’d bet $1000 that they are not made in the U.S.A. And I’d bet another $1000 that they’re made in China.
Pur is a bit vague on just exactly what they do, and where their products are manufactured. You find no country-of-origin information on their website, just the following addresses on their Linked in page (below). So let me start with the actual bricks-and-mortar addresses given for Pur.
Source: Linked in.
The circled address above is the only thing on any of their websites that links them to China.
Here’s their headquarters in Broomfield, CO. It’s one suite in an office park building that seems to have a high rate of turnover of the occupants.
Source: Google Maps, for 226 Commerce St, Unit C, Broomfield, CO 80020
The California address is a space in this similar-looking industrial park:
Source: Google Maps. The building shown is literally 220 Clary Ave. 226 must be the one behind it.
Here’s their Flossmoor IL, address. The only thing that seems even vaguely related to one of their product lines is the DME supplier on the first floor.
Source: Google Maps street view
But weirdest of all is that their Raleigh, NC address is actually a corporate office of the Wilson-Finley company, a wholesale supplier of construction equipment parts.
Source: Google Maps
Source: Google.
In fact, the only thing that even remotely makes a connection here is that Wilson Finley is in an importer:
Source: wilsonfinleyparts.com
The upshot is that this is looking a bit odd, for what appears to be a brand of canning supplies marketed nationally through Ace Hardware. The company is two years old. Their corporate locations are a collection of small offices in industrial parks, what appears to be a retail building in a small town, and what appears to be the corporate offices of an importer of construction equipment parts. If it weren’t for the Ace Hardware connection, I’d assume this was a fly-by-night company.
To be clear, there’s nothing here that even remotely looks like a manufacturing facility capable of supplying canning lids to the 5,000 Ace Hardware stores in the U.S. Nor does their website mention any corporate personnel associated with manufacturing. Just graphic arts, warehousing, accounting, supply chain management, and the founders.
So, if these folks are actually in the hands-on business of manufacturing something, in the U.S., they are mighty quiet about it. And where their domestic manufacturing facilities are, I cannot even begin to guess based on the information available from their website and Linked in pages.
OK, where are their lids made, then?
To be clear, I started down this road when I bought canning lids with no country-of-origin information from a reputable national retailer. I assumed, then, that those lids had to be U.S.-made. Otherwise, I thought the law required the country of origin to be displayed.
I thought I was helping some new U.S. manufacturing startup. I paid a significant premium for these Pur lids. They cost much more than the Ball lids available from my nearest Walmart.
But the more I look, the more convinced I am that all I did was pay for some steeply marked-up Chinese lids, in pretty red-white-and-blue packaging. I can’t prove that (yet) as I discuss below. But the odds of that appear overwhelming. And so, I feel like I got suckered. And, suckered by a hardware store that I have trusted for decades.
Here’s what I know.
The Pur jars are clearly marked as being made in China, and every internet source agrees that they are Chinese-made. Made in China is molded into the glass.
You can see some internet chatter about the lids, but as far as I can tell, most of it is just plain wrong. And nobody seems to have any definitive statement about where those lids are manufactured.
In particular, some people claim that the lids are the wrong size for U.S. jars. This is in the context of reports of large-scale failure of those lids (e.g., entire batches of canned goods where the lids failed to seal).
I haven’t canned anything with them yet, but I can be certain that the “wrong size” chatter is simply dead wrong. Near as I can tell, they are identical in size, and nearly identical in weight, to Ball-brand lids.
Here are pictures of a few head-to-head comparisons I did between the box of Pur lids and a box of genuine Ball lids.
Of interest, note the red-white-and-blue packaging, and the wavy lines that could be mistaken for an abstract representation of a flag. That should have tipped me off right there. But more telling is what’s on the Ball pack that is conspicuously absent from the Pur pack.
Physically, there’s almost no difference between the Ball and Pur lids.
The middle pictures above are of a Ball lid and a Pur lid stacked together. Top set shows Ball on top, bottom set shows Pur on top. If there is any difference in diameter, it would have to be in the sub-millimeter range.
By eye, the only conspicuous difference between the two was the shape of the dimply in the middle of the lid. With Ball, there’s no sharp outline. With Pur, there’s a clearly raised circle stamped into the metal.
I have no clue (yet) how well the Pur lids seal, but I can say with certainty that they are the same diameter as Ball lids to within a very small margin of error.
Conclusion
And so, at the end of the day, I still have not managed to nail down where, exactly, Pur lids are made. Probably China, all things considered.
In hindsight, the most telling difference is what’s circled in the first picture in the comparison. Upon reflection, I am absolutely sure that if Pur lids were made in the U.S.A., they’d be bragging about it on the package, the same as Ball does.
So I’m virtually certain they aren’t made in the U.S.A. Despite the lack of country-of-origin information. Despite the flag-waving red-white-and-blue packaging. The seller is just two years old, has no prior history of large-scale manufacturing, appears to have no U.S. manufacturing facility, and shows no executive staff devoted to manufacturing. And, to repeat, if they were made in the U.S.A., given how conservative home canners tend to be, I am sure they would say that proudly on the package.
Maybe it was stupid of me not to have noticed that. But, seriously, who can think that fast on their feet, while standing in the aisle of the store, to put all that together. And who would have thought that a trusted hardware retailer would put those packages on the shelf that fail to disclose that these are not U.S.A. made.
I guess those of you who don’t do home canning think this is a tempest in a teapot. Pretty much every manufactured good on the retail shelves is made somewhere other than the U.S.A. But canners have kind of a visceral attachment to using quality lids. You go to a lot of work to can a batch of produce. It takes time and effort, and degrades the final product, if you have to re-can them due to lid seal failures.
All said and done, I’m only a little mad at myself for buying these lids. I thought I was doing the right thing. But as I hope you can tell from this posting, I’m more than a bit irked at Ace Hardware. From now on, I’m going to think twice and look closely before I buy canning supplier there.
The bottom line to all of this is that if I wanted to gamble on Chinese-made lids with no track record for quality, I could have done that with my eyes wide open, at much lower cost, by taking my changes on Amazon.com. The issue is that I thought I was paying a premium at Ace Hardware specifically to avoid taking that gamble. Instead, I ended up with no-track-record (probably) Chinese lids anyway. Even though I scrutinized the package, I was led astray by the combination of lack of country-of-origin labeling on the package, sitting on the shelf of a reputable bricks-and-mortar retail store.
