"Ted Mittelstaedt" > wrote in message
...
>
>
> Historically the Ball lid made by Jardin used white paint on the inside of
> the lid to prevent the food contents from rusting the lid, and the Kerr
> lids made by Jardin use clear polyurethane to perform the same function,
> ie: the inside of the Kerr lid is golden in color.
>
> As far as I can tell this is done for purely historical marketing reasons
> because some people feel that the coating on one lid is better than the
> other and Jardin knows better than to bother a sleeping dog.
>
> But it -is- pretty clear to me that over the years Jardin's accountants
> have been nickel-and-diming the sealing material to save money, making
> it thinner and the strip itself narrower. They shaved probably a few
> mils off the thickness and the strip is a couple mm narrower. I would
> guess
> the savings add up to .000000001 cents per lid. :-/ They also used to
> stamp impress the Kerr and Ball name on the lid and now they just
> print them, I guess that saved another .000000001 cents per lid. And
> they also redesigned the graphic on the Ball lid to make it less pretty
> and
> more boring looking, thus making the printing simpler, saving another
> .0000001 cents per lid.
>
> No doubt some executive got a million dollar bonus over those ones.
>
> What I can't figure out for the life of me is why in blazes that Jardin
> has a lock on this market. There are hundreds of glass jar manufacturers
> out there who make commercial glass jars and commercial lids that spin
> on with the industry standard 1/4 and 1/2 turn, all competing with each
> other.
> And you can take the lid off a commercially canned pickle jar and see
> how much thicker the steel is in it and how much higher quality the
> sealing strip is.
>
> It would seem to me that the time is ripe for one of the commercial
> jar manufacturers to package their product for retail sale and make
> their one piece lids available for retail sale for home canning, and give
> Jardin a run for their money. Certainly at the volumes they produce
> they could easily undercut Jardin and still make a profit.
>

The problem is getting their products into the consumer-sales chain. It's a
totally different distribution, sales and marketing problem when consumers
are your customers rather than manufacturers.

For example, jars, rings and lids are often sold in grocery stores. Most
people don't know this, but in some parts of the country the manufacturer
(or distributor) pays the grocery store a fee for the shelf space in the
stores. Getting products on the shelf in these stores is more expensive
than in other parts of the country -- but getting grocers to give shelf
space for a product such as jars can be difficult in any part of the
country.

They coulkd of course sell lids on the internet -- but even though their
distribution problem would be solved, they'd have serious marketing
problems. They'd have to invest in new packaging equipment since consumers
are unlikley to want a case of a thousand lids delivered to their home.
Chances are good they'd not sell enough product to pay for the equipment
changes.

Anny





> I wonder if this is all a plot at Jarden to get us to move to those
> super expensive "Ball Collection Elite Platinum" lids that are just
> plain steel with a poly coat, no color anodization. It's the old story
> of introduce a cheaper replacement product, label it with a more
> expensive-sounding name, then make the existing product cruddier
> and cruddier over the following years so that it becomes unusable and
> you have to go to the more expensive product that gives you less.
>
> Ted
>