Bread Bag Clips: What Are They?
Bread bag clips are a plastic tab that has an opening with a couple of hooks. So when you compress your bag and then insert the bag into the clip, it maintains the closure on that bag. It’s been around for a long time.
The Kwik Lok company invented it. And now there are various incarnations on the market you will see. But the bread bag clip has been a staple of the packaging industry, revolving around bread.
It does have the benefit of printing onto it. You’ll often see that on your market shelves. It has not only information for compliance for the market. There is also sourcing information from the bread manufacturer. This includes expiration dates and other information that might be useful to the customer.
Common Alternatives
There are common alternatives to the bread bag clip. There’s the twist tie, which can be now either metal core or plastic core, or poly-core. Poly-core has the advent of being able to pass through metal detection. That’s important for some manufacturers. Of course, customers may also have certain compliance requirements.
The metal core in the traditional tie, that is, does a great job of providing not only a reusable tie. It is also an effective tie that maintains airtight properties to it. A bread bag clip does not have this feature. The compression is different.
There’s also tape on the market. A tape seal does a fantastic job. It does a pretty good job of compression. But the downside is that once you open it up, you cannot reuse it. So the customer is now left with a different method of after-market. After opening closure they’re left to their own devices, whatever that may be. It may be a twist tie hanging out in a drawer.
Oxygen Causes Degradation
There’s a good story about the bread bag clips that we’ve seen come across our ears. We have a lot of requests coming in and we hear the pain points from a lot of customers. One story was, and without being too specific, the bread bag clip was not containing the bag on the shelf. There’s a lot of problems with that, where if the bag is partly contained by the clip, air is getting into the product.
Of course, any oxygen or air getting into the bag can cause degradation of the product faster. So they came to us with that problem at hand. They felt that the twist tie solution was the better option for them. It not only has a longer shelf life available to them. It’s not very common that a twist tie is to come undone very well by itself.
So it was making it to the shelf, providing shelf life. Of course, with both solutions, you do get the re-usability factor. But market information believes that consumers prefer the twist tie instead of the bread bag clip.
