I've been canning my own food for well over a decade now. I've always been able to waltz into a number of stores and pick up a dozen wide-mouth Ball lids for around $1.99. Since 2020, the cost of canning lids has skyrocketed. Why is this?
I'll attempt to explain it to you.
Since the start of the pandemic, we've had shortages on various things. This country has been in short supply of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, disinfectants (Lysol), paper towels...even certain varieties of Girl Scout cookies. One thing that has also been in short supply are Ball canning lids.
A canning lid shortage is to be expected because there are more people growing backyard gardens and canning stuff at home is the general consensus. Is this right? Well, not really.
At first, a canning lid shortage was understandable. As I stated, more people were staying home, growing gardens and canning stuff at home. With that new influx of home canners, the canning lid suppliers needed to be able to catch up with this unprecedented public demand. However, the scarcity of canning lids hasn't changed at all.
We saw a shortage of toilet paper. It rectified itself eventually. Hand sanitizer eventually got squared away. Disinfectants did the same. Everything that had an initial shortage got straightened out except for canning lids. Why? The suppliers have had ample opportunity to catch up, yet we, as consumers, are left wondering why there are so few Ball canning lids available and why they are so expensive?
What the average home canner may not know is that canning lids, which have been around since 1884, and canning jars, which have been around since 1858, are no longer being made by Ball and Kerr (the two big manufacturers of American canning supplies). The fact is that these two companies were under their parent company, Jarden Corp. Jarden Corp, with it's diverse global portfolio of well-known brands like Ball, Yankee Candle, Calphalon, etc., was acquired by a mega-corporation called Newell Brands. At the time it acquired Jarden Corp, it was known as Newell Rubbermaid. This transaction closed in April 2016 and, at that time, they moved their headquarters from Atlanta, GA to Hoboken, NJ. Since Ball and Kerr were just two of a long list of brands they have, consumer demands for any one product is just not a priority for this mega-corporation. Ball and Kerr are just one of a long list of brands under this parent company.
When the 2020 pandemic hit and created a huge demand for home canning supplies, Newell Brands did what any other major corporation would do. They decided to capitalize on this demand. Newel Brands decided that it wouldn't try to sell Ball brand products at every store handling canning supplies as it did in the past, but, rather, they would concentrate their sales through the online giant Amazon and a few select major chains like Walmart and Ace Hardware.
Long story short, they are a monopoly supplier.
Coinciding with this, in 2019, Newell Brands announced that they would close the Ball manufacturing plant in Muncie, Indiana. It has been located there for decades prior. They moved manufacturing to Columbus, Ohio and packing/distribution was moved to Fishers, Indiana.
None of this information has really gotten out to us who can at home. Instead, we've gotten a plethora of ridiculous excuses, with really only one of those being remotely plausible. We were told that there was a shortage of workers at the manufacturing plants. This could, very well, be true enough, just to be fair.
Then, we were told that there was a labor shortage in shipping and at port docks. Could someone explain why a labor shortage at port docks would effect the distribution of a product that is manufactured wholly in the United States? I'll wait...
We have heard that there was an aluminum shortage. Okay. That's fine. Canning lids are made of stainless steel and they have a silicon gasket. So, I'm not sure what apples have to do with oranges, but that was an excuse that was dished out to the public as being a reason why canning lids are in short supply.
We were even told that a wood shortage, in early 2021, caused a pallet shortage and they couldn't pack the canning lid boxes on pallets and it caused canning lids to be in short supply. Yeah. I'm not gonna touch that one but something stinks like a load of bull.......(sitting on my hands right here).
The truth of the matter is that Newell Brands is limiting its product to certain markets and they are charging whatever they want because, well, they can. If we, the home canning public, want to have quality canning lids, we have no choice other than pay what they want for their product.
Canning lids, sold by themselves, are scarce. When you buy a dozen canning jars, they are sold with lids and rings but anyone who cans at home already has a supply of jars and rings, since those can be used over and over again. We simply don't need those things. If you pay attention to what stores have in stock, the only retailers that are being currently stocked with Ball/Kerr products are Walmart and Ace Hardware and that doesn't mean that they are available at every location, either.
If you decide to order them from Amazon, you're going to pay dearly for them. I was checking out prices on Amazon this morning and the cheapest price I could find for just one dozen of wide-mouth lids, Ball brand, was $9.50. Talk about a slap of reality! I used to pay a mere $1.99 for those and that was not very long ago! This explains why I haven't been able to score at Lowe's when they have their clearance sale, in late fall, of their canning supplies. I guess those events are in the past now.
On Amazon, there's an assortment of generic lids available. They are cheap. They are not manufactured in the United States. If you read the reviews, they are very poor quality. The consensus is that they are simply junk. Lots of times, they don't even fit your jars correctly and good luck finding wide-mouth.
I'm also reading where people are reusing their Ball/Kerr canning lids because of how much they cost. There are canning lids that are meant to be reused. Tattler is one of the brands. With the cost of Ball/Kerr, this may just be the way to go in the future. I think that the one-time use lids are very comparable in price to Tattlers. But, I do not recommend reusing one-time use lids. That's a recipe for disaster. It's just not safe to do.
Click here to get further information on Newell Products.
Click here for a 2021 news clip from CBS Minnesota explaining about canning lid shortages.
Click here to read about another person's odyssey trying to find canning lids.
So, I'm here to tell you that there really isn't a canning lid shortage in this country. There never was. This is simply one corporation being able to set the market. Welcome to the world of corporate greed.
