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 flattened that groove considerably. I picked up this tip boiling lids if you plan to re-use them from the blog A Traditional Life.
One of the many U.S. shortages that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic was a shortage of lids for use in home canning. I’ve posted extensively on that here.
The oddity is, this shortage of U.S.-made canning lids was never resolved. I’ve been periodically checking for the availability of Ball-brand wide mouth lids (as those are the lids I typically use). Among the things I’ve done has been to check for availability at a fixed (unchanging) random sample of 20 Walmarts across the U.S.
Availability was, at best, on-again, off-again, for the entire 2021 canning season. The top two graphs below show the state of affairs at what I would call the start and end of the 2021 canning season. By the end of the season, those lids were unavailable at 80 percent of my small sample of Walmarts. I summarized that in Post G21-053, October 9, 2021.
The bottom line is that as of the end of last year, the canning lid shortage had not been resolved. And by “resolved” I mean that the average home canner could walk into their usual supplier and pick up a few packs of U.S.-made wide-mouth lids at something near the pre-pandemic price.
Instead, for most of the season, your options were:
- Buy what you hope are genuine Ball lids from Amazon at 3x or 4x the pre-pandemic price,
- Take a gamble on Chinese-made lids on Amazon (for roughly the pre-pandemic Ball lid price)
- Switch to re-usable lids (if you could find them) and tweak your canning techniques accordingly.
- Re-use lids (not recommended by the experts).
Structural changes in the market for lids in 2022
The 2022 caning year seemed to get off to a pretty good start, in terms of canning lid availability. That’s the third graph above. As of early March, you could get those lids, one way or the other, from about 85% of the Walmarts in my sample.
I didn’t want to make too much of that, as they could still evaporate off the shelves. But things were looking up, at least.
Then a couple of odd things happened.
First, my local go-to supplier (Ace Hardware) quietly switched from Ball brand to Pur brand. The in-store shelf space previously taken up by Ball jars and other supplies was now mostly occupied by their Pur equivalents.
Nothing on the packaging of the Pur lids indicated the country of origin, but those are, in fact, Chinese-made lids. Selling for more than the normal price of Ball-brand lids.
A closer look reveals that Pur Health Group (not to be confused with Pur water filters, which is a completely different company) is yet another one of those pop-up LLCs created to profit off pandemic shortages. Their business model marries those two closely-related lines of business, personal protective equipment (PPE) and canning supplies. (/S). Which they don’t make, but simply import from China and sell in red-white-and-blue packaging. With no mention of the country of origin. See Post G22-002.
So, let me correct that to read my former local go-to supplier.
Based on what I’m seeing at Ace Hardware, one bit of fallout from the pandemic is that a major U.S. retailer gave up on Ball in favor of Chinese-made canning supplies. (Note that I didn’t say cheap Chinese goods. Those PUR lids, in their red-white-and-blue packaging, were considerably more expensive than the usual pre-pandemic price for Ball lids).
For as long as I can recall, I’ve been able to buy Ball canning supplies at my local Ace Hardware. My guess would be that, without the pandemic, I still would. But after all those years, Ball got pushed off the shelves by a two-year-old pandemic startup whose business model is to buy Chinese-made canning lids and disguise them in all-American-looking packaging with no country-of-original (“Made in China”) markings.
It makes me wonder if this is how yet another American industry dies. The business back-story on Ball already reads like a tale of everything that’s wrong with American business. They had more-or-less a monopoly on canning lids in the U.S. (Ball/Kerr/Golden Harvest). But their corporate story is anything but that of a folksy old-line business. After being bought and sold numerous times, Ball(/Kerr/Golden Harvest) is now a tiny sub-division of the consumer goods conglomerate Newell Brands. See Post #g21-009.
And they failed meet demand when U.S. consumers really needed their product. Which opened the way for their former monopoly position in the U.S. market to be eaten up by Chinese competitors.
Putting those happy thoughts aside, there’s also been what I can only describe as a bizarre change in the relative price of regular-mouth and wide-mouth lids. I first noticed this when I glanced at the canning supplies at my local Safeway. I was so surprised, I took a picture of the goods on the shelf, to document what I was seeing:
Source: Pan-Am Safeway, Fairfax County, VA
This is new. Or, at least, this seems new to me. This, being that wide-mouth lids have a standard on-the-shelf price that’s more than twice that of regular lids.
Seeking independent verification, I checked prices at my local Warmarts. Wide-mouth Ball lids are in stock for $4.43 a pack. Narrow mouth, also in stock for $2.97. That’s not quite as large a ratio (only 1.5:1, not the 2:1 at Safeway).
Whether the surcharge is 50% or 100% of the price for regular-mouth lids, I think that’s new. In the past, I recall that the difference in price was just two or three cents per lid. Regular mouth packs would sell for about $2.25, and wide-mouth packs would sell for about $2.50, or a roughly ten percent premium.
I have no idea why that’s changed, or whether this is going to be a permanent change in how Ball lids are priced.
But if that’s a permanent change, then the joke’s on me. I went all-wide-mouth years ago. I got tired of juggling two sets of jars, rings, and lids, and simply got rid of all my regular-mouth jars. And, as cheap as I am, I’m sure I wouldn’t have done that if I’d thought it would substantially increase the cost of the disposable lids.
So, who knows? Maybe that’s temporary, maybe that’s the new normal. In either case, this substantial surcharge for wide-mouth lids is just one more odd aspect of a market that just can’t quite seem to return to its pre-pandemic condition.
On the bright side, I’m not seeing much indication of a shortage of Ball lids in general. Regular-mouth are available from main-stream suppliers for maybe 15% to 30% more than (what I recall as) the usual pre-pandemic price. Wide mouth are available, but only with a much steeper price hike. Either way, unlike 2020 or 2021, if you want Ball reliability, you can once again purchase it without having to jump through hoops. It may just cost a bit more than before, that’s all.
