Member-only story
Why Everyone’s Suddenly Hoarding Mason Jars
How the must-have hipster vessel of DIY authenticity also became a foreboding signal of the economy.
Late this summer, after the pandemic turned everyone into an amateur gardener and home cook, a frenzy erupted on Facebook. Food historian Sarah Wassberg Johnson first spotted it while perusing a private Facebook group called Recipes of North Dakota — everyone was talking about mason jars. “For many of them, food preservation is a part of their daily life,” says Wassberg Johnson, who grew up in Fargo. They were keeping tabs on where they saw canning jars and lids, trying to nail down a fast-moving target. “It was this live tracking of them — this store in this town, this hardware store had them — where can you get them?”
In Brooklyn, Ashley Rouse, founder and CEO of Trade Street Jam, was frantically searching for mason jars, too, so she could sell her jams, which come in flavors like strawberry chipotle fig and blueberry lemon basil. “I need 30,000 small jars, and I can’t find them,” she says. “We’d normally get them from huge manufacturers, pallets at a time, but those places ran out. I’ve never seen that happen.”
At the same time, mason jar sellers were watching them fly off the shelves. Keela Buford, a representative of The Jar Store, a national…
