When to Buy a Pressure Canner, and Why August Is the Worst Time

Short answer, before you scroll: buy your pressure canner between January and April. Not July. Definitely not August.

And we're not saying that to get you to hurry. We're saying it because we pulled our own inventory report this morning, July 30, and it's a little embarrassing. Of the five All American canner sizes we stock, four are sitting at zero and the fifth has exactly one unit on the shelf. That's a kitchen store, in peak canning season, with essentially no canners to sell you. Not our finest hour!

So this article is partly a confession and partly a calendar. Here's why it happens every single year, when you should actually be shopping, and what to do if you're reading this in August with a counter full of tomatoes and no canner.

Here's what our canner shelf actually looked like on July 30

No rounding, no "limited availability" hedging. This is the real number from our own system on the morning this went up:

The lone survivor is the little one. All American 910 ($349.95) holds 7 regular-mouth pint jars or 4 regular-mouth quarts. (Switch to wide mouth and those drop to 5 and 3, because wide-mouth jars are, well, wider.) It's the smallest canner All American makes, it weighs 15 pounds empty, and it is the one size nobody fights over in July because everybody wants the big one.

Manufacturer's own capacity chart for the 910. All American notes that jar counts are approximate and vary by jar brand and style, which matches what we see: regular mouth fits more than wide mouth.

Why this happens every year (it's a foundry, not a factory glitch)

Here's the part most people may not realize. These canners aren't stamped out of sheet metal on a line that can run a second shift when demand spikes. All American canners are cast aluminum, poured and machined at the Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and they have been since 1930. Same foundry, same town, ninety-six years running!

The Manitowoc foundry, back when the cars out front were new. Casting capacity is the whole reason August runs dry.

A foundry has a pour schedule. You cannot talk a foundry into an extra thousand canners in six weeks because the tomatoes came in early in Michigan. Meanwhile demand isn't a curve, it's a cliff: it's flat all winter and then every gardener in America looks at their counter on the same August Saturday and thinks I should probably get a canner.

Then add the retail layer. Stores like ours commit to canning orders months ahead, usually in winter, based on a guess. Guess low and you're us on July 30. Guess high and you're sitting on $500 canners through Christmas. Nobody in this chain is being cute with you. It's just a slow-moving supply meeting a very fast-moving want.

So when should you buy a pressure canner? Aim for the dead of winter

If buying a $499 canner in February for a job you won't do until August feels backwards, try the math Josiah uses on every purchase in his own kitchen: cost per use. An All American has no gasket to perish, no plastic to fatigue, and a machined metal-to-metal seal that people are still using on canners their grandmothers bought. Spread $499.95 over twenty Augusts and you're at twenty-five bucks a season. Spread it over two generations and it stops being a purchase and starts being an inheritance!

The metal-to-metal machined seal. No rubber gasket means there's no gasket to hunt for in August either, which is a supply-chain feature disguised as an engineering one.

The sellout isn't one event, it's a sequence

This is the thing you only notice if you're staring at an inventory report all summer. Canning gear doesn't sell out all at once. It goes in a predictable order, and knowing the order is how you stay ahead of it.

• First, the big equipment goes. Canners. Usually late June through mid-July, biggest sizes first. Ours are gone at the time of writing, thanks for the reminder. If you're reading this some months down the road, there's a decent chance we've restocked since, so go check rather than taking July's word for it.
• Then the odd-count accessories thin out. The stuff you only need one of and never think about until you're standing over a boiling pot. As of this morning we're down to a single stainless canning funnel and a single long-handled canning ladle. Not zero! But close enough that I wouldn't count on them next week.
• Then replacement parts, which is the one that really hurts. Our vent pipes, regulator weights, and All American canning racks are all at zero right now. Your canner works fine in April. In August, when the gauge reads funny, the part isn't there.
• Lids are the exception, and that's deliberate. More on that below.

So here's the move: buy your replacement parts in February, when nothing is happening. A tested steam pressure gauge ($26.49) costs the same in February as it does in August. The difference is that in February it exists. Get your gauge tested over the winter, order the part then, and let it sit in a drawer being boring until the day you need it. Boring is the entire point!

Waited anyway? You've still got four real moves

Nobody needs a lecture in August. If the tomatoes are already on the counter, here's what actually works:

• Water bath everything you legally can. High-acid foods (most fruit, jams, jellies, pickles, properly acidified tomatoes) never needed a pressure canner in the first place. A big stock pot and a Deluxe Canning Rack ($14.99) covers a shocking amount of the harvest! Low-acid foods like green beans, corn, and meat still require pressure. That rule doesn't bend.
• Fix the canner you already own instead of replacing it. An All American that "doesn't hold pressure" is usually a $26 gauge or a $5 plug away from another decade of service. A five-dollar part, on a canner you were about to replace at five hundred! Our gauges, overpressure plugs, and clamp bolt kits are all still in stock as of this writing.
• Go hunting secondhand. All American canners hold their value so well that people actively scrounge estate sales for them, which cuts both ways. If you find one, grab it! Then replace the gauge before you trust it.
• Freeze now, can in October. Genuinely underrated! Freeze the beans and the tomatoes whole, buy your canner when the world calms down, and process them on a cold Saturday when standing over a steaming pot sounds pleasant instead of punishing.

Related reading: Pressure Canner vs Water Bath: one rule decides what you can safely can →
The 4.6 pH line, explained plainly, so you know exactly which half of your harvest can skip the canner.

Why lids are the one thing we deliberately overstock

You'll notice we didn't put lids on the shortage list. That's on purpose, and it's the one place we've decided to just eat the inventory cost. Right now we're holding a few thousand packs of regular mouth Superb lids (from $4.97 for 12), in July, on purpose.

Why? Because a canner shortage is annoying, but a lid shortage in the middle of a harvest is the one that makes people give up on canning entirely. We lived through the 2020 version of that and didn't care for it. Superb makes theirs in one factory in Sugarcreek, Ohio, and we actually know the people who run it! We'd rather sit on too many lids than tell you in September that we're out.

Oh, and one more nice thing about a machined metal seal: you'll never stand in a checkout line hunting a replacement gasket for the canner itself. One less part to lose sleep over!

Start your canning season in February instead

Shop All American pressure canners, parts, and racks →
Every size we carry plus the replacement parts, with live availability on each page. Bookmark it and come back in January, when it's all sitting there waiting for you.

Shop all canning and food preservation supplies →
Lids, jars, racks, funnels, lifters, and everything else that goes thin around the second week of August.

Questions about which size fits your stove, or whether the canner in your basement is worth saving? Email us at support@kooihousewares.com. We're a real store in Muskegon, Michigan, and somebody here has almost certainly canned the thing you're asking about. Orders over $49 ship free in the lower 48.

FAQ: the questions we answer at the counter every week

When is the best time to buy a pressure canner?

January through April. Selection is complete, every replacement part is in stock, and you aren't competing with the entire country's harvest panic. May and June are still workable. By mid-July the big sizes are typically gone, and by August most retailers, us included, are picking through what's left.

Why are pressure canners always out of stock in August?

Because production is steady and demand is a spike. All American canners are cast at a foundry in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and a foundry can't add a thousand units in six weeks to chase a good tomato year. Retailers order months ahead on a guess, and in a strong garden season that guess runs out. It isn't a marketing tactic, it's casting capacity.

Can I still can this year without a pressure canner?

Yes, for high-acid foods. Jams, jellies, pickles, most fruit, and properly acidified tomatoes are all safe in a boiling water bath with a rack and a deep stock pot. Low-acid foods, meaning green beans, corn, carrots, meat, and plain tomatoes without added acid, require a pressure canner. There's no workaround for that one, and it's a botulism risk, not a preference.

Do pressure canners go on sale at the end of canning season?

Some do clear out in late fall. It's worth noticing which ones, though: the stores running the deepest end-of-season markdowns are often the same ones whose prices crept up in July when you actually needed the thing. A big discount off an inflated number isn't a discount. We don't run that game, so our price is our price in February and in August, and waiting for a fall markdown from Kooi Housewares just means waiting. For the best shot at the size you actually want, shop the winter restock rather than the November leftovers.

Is the smallest canner worth buying if the big ones are sold out?

It depends on your batch size, honestly. The 910 handles 7 regular-mouth pints per run, which is fine for pints of beans, small meat batches, or a household of two or three. If you're putting up a hundred quarts of tomatoes, running that many small loads will wear you out, and you're better off water-bathing this year and buying the size you want in January.