140 Years of
Preserving
What Matters.
A brand film, a photography campaign, and a recipe book that functions as an heirloom.
140 years is a milestone. Make it feel earned, not ceremonial.
Ball Jar is one of America's most beloved heritage brands. The 140th anniversary was a chance to reaffirm that in a culture that has rediscovered making things by hand. The brief wasn't to celebrate the number. It was to celebrate what the number represents.
The resurgence of canning, preserving, and home cooking isn't just a trend. It's a rejection of the disposable. Ball jars are artifacts of that rejection. They carry what matters forward. Strategic Insight
Don't celebrate the anniversary. Celebrate what Ball jars make possible.
The film captures three generations of a family. A grandmother teaching her daughter, who is teaching her own child. The jar moves through time. What goes inside changes. The act of preserving and handing down does not. It's not a commercial about a jar. It's a film about memory, continuity, and care.
The recipe book is designed as an heirloom. Not a promotional giveaway. An object worth keeping, writing in, and passing down. Every layout decision, every paper choice, every typographic choice reinforces the idea that this is a book that gets better as it gets older.
A 140-year-old jar deserves a book worth keeping.
For the anniversary, we built the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving, 38th Edition. Two hundred plus pages. Five hundred plus recipes, forty of them new. Updated to current USDA preserving standards. Designed as the heirloom version of an object Americans have leaned on since 1909.
200+
Pages of know-how
500+
Recipes inside
40
All new for this edition
140
Years of preserving
Simple. Delicious. Rewarding. Take eating fresh and local to a whole new level.