HISTORY OF THE KWIK LOK BREAD TAG COMPANY

BREAD CLIPS! CONSIDER THEM FOR a moment, if you will. They’re those flat pieces of semi-hard plastic formed into a sort of barbed U-shape—you know the ones. They can be found keeping bread bags all over the world closed and safe from spoilage, smartly designed to be used and reused. They’re all around us, constantly providing an amazing service, and yet still, they’re taken for granted. And it turns out they’re almost exclusively all produced by a single, family-owned company.

Kwik Lok, based in Yakima, Washington, has been manufacturing these little tabs ever since their founder whittled the first one from a credit card.

Without giving specific numbers, Kwik Lok says that they sell an almost unimaginable number each year. “It’s in the billions,” says Leigh Anne Whathen, a sales coordinator for the company, who says she personally prefers plastic clips to their natural enemy, the twist tie, because they last longer.

Floyd Paxton, Kwik Lok’s founder, was a second-generation manufacturing engineer who began his career working alongside his father, Hale, producing nail machines during World War II. Prior to the post-war plastics boom, both Paxton and his father produced, among other things, the nails used to close wooden boxes of fruit. In other words, package sealing was in Paxton’s blood.

According to the Kwik Lok website, the idea for the bread clip came to Paxton during a flight in 1952. As the story goes, while he was on the plane, Paxton was eating a package of complimentary nuts, and he realized he didn’t have a way to close them if he wanted to save some for later. As a solution, he took out a pen knife and hand-carved the first bread clip out of a credit card (in some tellings, it was an expired credit card).

Paxton established the Kwik Lok Corporation in 1954 in California, and quickly set out to popularize the tabs (now known officially as Kwik Lok Closures) by using them to close bags of apples. The company eventually moved to Washington state, where their headquarters are still located.

According to Whathen, Kwik Lok secured a patent on their little innovation in the early days of the company, and to this day, Kwik Lok remains one of the only manufacturers of bread clips in the world. Whathen says that the only other firm she’s aware of is a European competitor called Schutte.

To read the complete article, see:
Most of the World’s Bread Clips Are Made by a Single Company (http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/bread-tabs-clips-paxton)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
BREAD TAG BONANZA (http://www.coinbooks.org/v20/esylum_v20n21a28.html)

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