The War Between The Twist Ties And Bread Clips

If you are bakery enthusiast, you may have noticed the way of the bread bag sealing: a little plastic clip (which is known as bread clip or bread tag) and a twist tie. 

Whether the plastic clip or twist tie, they cannot be changed or wiped out by the other way. It is the latest move in a business war that’s been under way for more than half a century now. It’s a battle fought by the makers of inconspicuous little products that cost a fraction of a penny to produce—the ones that everyone knows but nobody thinks about, but which represents more than $10 million in annual sales. Insiders describe the turf as the bakery bag closure and reclosure market; this is the battle of the plastic clip vs the twist-tie. Even the manufacturer of these two products, they never think they can replace the other one.

The bread clip was created by a man named Floyd Paxton who found it in a journey. And Paxton soon founded Kwik Lok, and still the dominant clip manufacturer today, with plants on four continents. The clips were originally applied by hand to bags of apples, but Kwik Lok began making automated machinery to apply the clips to bakery products in the early 1960s. At the same time, Oklahoma-based Burford developed similar machinery to apply twist-ties.    From that time, they involved themselves into the war of sealing.

Nowadays, more and more manufacture of twist ties and bread clips have born. And the twist ties and bread clip has been used for a wider territory like vegetables, fruit, industrial manufacture. Still no data documents can show that the two products’ relative market shares in the bakery aisle. Bread clip has the advantage in having a printable surface, which can carry prices, sell-by dates, and even 2D bar codes that can direct a consumer to recipes or other promotions. And twist ties show the advantage in more areas and cheaper than the bread clip.

People has the different emotion on the two sealing ways and there still have many people who using these two products to show the worlds beauty. “Consumers instinctively didn’t feel like it was sealed well enough, and they wanted to keep turning, so most companies went back to a half-turn,” says Lisa Pierce, executive editor of the trade magazine Packaging Digest.

Anyway, the war between the twist ties and bread clips still exists and will exist in the future.