Every once in a while I check in on the status of the U.S. canning lid market.
I started in July 2020, when there was an acute shortage of canning lids. WHen the pandemic hit, a lot of people took up gardening. That first led to a shortage of garden seeds in the spring, and then to a shortage of canning supplies in the summer and fall.
But there were a lot of shortages that year.
And yet, the shortage of U.S.-made canning lids persisted into 2021. By that time it was a somewhat odd shortage. If you were willing to pay enough, or settle for Chinese-made lids, you could buy all the lids you wanted. What you couldn’t reliably find was U.S-made Ball lids offered at a reasonable price. Wide mouth Ball lids that sold for about 25 cents each pre-pandemic (in bulk) were routinely offered at 70 cents each (in bulk) on Amazon.
My last post was in April 2022. At that point, it looked like things were settling down, but not necessarily in a good way. Near as I could tell, there seemed to be hefty premium on Ball wide-mouth lids. If you could get them. That was new and unwelcome development, as I only use wide-mouth jars.
The market today.
My bellwether for checking the state of the market is the 12-pack of Ball wide-mouth lids. I’m looking for whether or not they are available locally (on-the-shelf), and at what price.
The good news is that I can find wide-mouth lids, on the shelf, in my area. Though not at any of my local Walmarts, at least according to their website.
The bad news is, they’re priced at 50 cents a lid.
The worse news is that this seems to be the new market-clearing rate, as you can now find those lids on Amazon for roughly the same price as local retail. My local prices went up. (The same pack was just over $3 at Walmart last year). The Amazon prices came down. (These were available at 70 cents per lid last year.) And they appear to have met in the middle, at 50 cents per lid, no matter where you buy them.
I’m going to have to guess that this is the retail price from now on.
(FWIW, the best price I stumbled across, on-line, for wide-mouth Ball lids was from Fillmore Container. And even then, in small quantities, they are only slightly cheaper than my local retail price.)
What about Tattler, the other U.S.-made lid?
A lot of canners — myself included — are reluctant to use anything but U.S. made canning lids. All you have to do is read the comments on Amazon to understand why. A lot of Chinese-made lids are inferior to Ball lids, with significantly higher reported rates of seal failures and reports of corrosion when used to pack acidic foods. It’s not that there are no good imported lids. It’s that imported lids are a gamble that I’d rather avoid. (For those of you who aren’t canners, a failed lid seal is a real pain in the neck.)
But there is a U.S.-made alternative to disposable canning lids — Tattler lids. (And knock-offs of Tattler lids). These are re-usable plastic lids with separate rubber seals. And, it sure looks like they haven’t raised prices. Possibly, they cut prices.
At the going rate, if you re-use a Tattler wide-mouth lid even once, it works out to be cheaper than disposable Ball lids.
What’s particularly galling about the price of Ball wide-mouth lids is that they have (or until recently, had) a monopoly on U.S.-made lids. Ball, Kerr, Golden Harvest were all the same company. If you wanted U.S.-made lids, you bought from them.
Now, however, Tattler says they’re going to start making disposable metal lids. (This, from their website). That new product is not yet for sale on their website.
Which leads me to ask an obvious question: At 50 cents per lid, retail, surely somebody else can make quality lids in the U.S. and provide some much-needed competition. Looks like Tattler is going to try. Are there any others?
And the answer is yes. There appears to be a new U.S.-based manufacturer of disposable canning lids.
Here’s Superb brand canning lids, offered for 42 cents a lid at Dutchman’s Store. It is also offered at Lehman’s, for as little as 28 cents a lid if bought in huge quantity (300 lids). But the Amazon reviews suggestion some caution, as these may not as reliable as Ball lids.
And the longer I look, the more I find. Here are one more that appears to be USA-made, taken from a blog called The Canning Diva.
North Mountain Supply sells US-made lids, but as far as I can tell they only have one-piece lids for use in canning. Near as I can tell, the USDA Guide to Home Canning does not approve of using one-piece lids in home canning.
Are home canning lids FDA-approved?
In a word, no. Not as far as I can tell. Not as such.
But.
I keep seeing the statement that only Ball (and associated) two-piece lids are “FDA approved.” But a) I’ve never seen the FDA statement of approval, and b) the USDA 2015 Guide to Home Canning does not contain the phrase FDA or Food and Drug Administration. That guide simply tells to use a disposable lid, and provides a generic description of the standard two-piece lid with sealing compound under the outer rim.
I have now spent considerable time searching on-line, including the US FDA website. My conclusion is that “FDA-approved canning lids” is nonsense.
That said, there is a concept of “FDA Compliant” plastics used for food contact. (E.g., explained on this website). In terms of plastics, the FDA approves just a half-dozen broad categories of plastic for use as food containers. But it approves a huge list of substances as usable in contact with food. If you want to see everything (not just plastic) allowed for food contact, you have to look on the FDA website itself.
When asked, Ball stated that the materials used in its lids were FDA compliant, just after they were reformulated to remove BPA from the plastic liner. You can see the full quote on this website, Growing a Greener World. There, Ball quotes chapter-and-verse of their compliance with specific FDA regulations regarding both the plastic lining and the seal of the lid.
To the best of my recollection, I have never seen a canning lid advertised as using FDA-compliant materials. So I’m not sure if this is an issue or not.
For sure, broad classes of pure materials are deemed FDA compliant, such as silicone and natural rubber (from the FDA website noted just above). But whether or not the exact formulation used for the seal, or the exact plastic used to line the lid are FDA compliant is not clear.
The FDA’s authorization stems from the 1958 Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act. Anything that’s sold as food for human consumption, in the U.S., is supposed to comply with that act. But in addition to regulating food, the FDA regulates “food contact items”, that is, anything designed to come into contact with food. For example, that’s the authority under which the FDA banned lead-glazed pottery that might be used for serving or storing food. This covers, among other things, tableware, water bottles, and such. Anything sold legally in the U.S., for those purposes, has to be made of FDA compliant materials. (As explained in this link, to a .pdf from the professional association for manufacturers of promotional materials.)
So the short answer is that anything legally sold in the U.S., for use in contact with food, should be made of FDA-compliant materials. That’s the law.
Whether or not that law is enforced is a completely separate question. My guess is that unless there’s some significant cause for testing, nothing gets done and nothing is enforced. Likely that it’s more-or-less on the honor system, with some penalties if you get caught. If the FDA can impose those penalties.
At the end of the day, such-and-such canning lid is not “FDA approved”. In theory, every lid legally sold in the U.S. is supposed to use nothing but FDA-compliant substances for the inside of the lid. Whether or not all manufacturers do that, or whether the FDA actually tests and enforces anything, is an open question. Unless a manufacturer does what Ball (Newell Brands) did, and publicly certify that the materials used in their lids meet FDA standards, then I think food safety of some off-brand canning jar lid is a matter of faith. The sole exception would be if the manufacturer states that the lid is made with simple materials that you can directly check as being FDA-compliant, at the FDA web page cited above.
