# The Can Is the Product: Ball Corporation and the Toll on Almost Every Aluminum Drink

Ball Corporation stopped making the mason jar it is famous for and became the company that makes the can. It ships about 103 billion of them a year and gets paid whatever is inside.

Author: J.A. Watte
Published: July 21, 2026
Source: https://jwatte.com/blog/ball-corporation-the-container-toll/

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*This is a companion to the piece on why [bottled water is mostly markup](/blog/bottled-water-is-mostly-markup/), where the point was that you are paying for the packaging, the brand, and the convenience, not the water. If the packaging is the product, then the most durable business in the whole aisle is not any water or soda brand. It is the company that makes the packaging and collects on it no matter whose drink is inside. That company, for a very large share of the cans in America, is Ball Corporation. Every figure below is cited to a company filing, a federal agency, an industry body, or a named source, and where a number is contested or could not be confirmed at a primary source I say so.*

Pick up a can of soda, beer, sparkling water, or energy drink. The brand on the outside is fighting a brutal, low-margin war for your attention, spending fortunes on advertising to make you choose it over the identical-looking can beside it. The can itself is not fighting that war. It gets bought either way. Whoever wins the shelf still has to buy the container, and for a huge slice of the market the container comes from one company in Westminster, Colorado, that most people have never thought about and many still associate with canning jars.

That is the quiet shape of the packaging business. The brands take the risk and the marketing cost. The container maker takes a steadier cut off the top, on volume, regardless of which brand wins. It is a toll on the drink, collected one can at a time.

## From mason jars to aluminum: the company that stopped making the jar

Ball is one of those names that means one thing to your grandmother and something else entirely on the stock exchange.

The company was founded in 1880 in Buffalo, New York, by the five Ball brothers, who started out making tin cans wrapped in wooden jackets. They incorporated as the Ball Brothers Manufacturing Company in 1886 and moved the operation to Muncie, Indiana, around 1887, chasing cheap natural gas to fire glass furnaces. The first Muncie glass jars came off the line in 1888. What made them a household name was the home-canning jar. After John Mason's patent expired, the Ball brothers made Mason-style jars by the tens of millions, and by 1905 the company was turning out something like 60 million canning jars a year. For generations, "a Ball jar" was the thing on the pantry shelf full of tomatoes.

Here is the part almost nobody knows: Ball Corporation does not make that jar anymore, and has not for over thirty years. In April 1993 it spun the glass home-canning business off as a separate public company, Alltrista Corporation. Alltrista renamed itself Jarden in 2002, and Jarden was swallowed by Newell Rubbermaid, now Newell Brands, in 2016. Newell Brands holds the license to the Ball name for home-canning jars today. So the nostalgic blue Ball jar in the antique store is, as a business, a Newell product. The Ball Corporation on the New York Stock Exchange spent the twentieth century walking away from glass and toward metal.

It walked a long way. Ball built an aerospace arm, Ball Aerospace and Technologies, that made instruments for the Kepler planet-hunting mission, contributed to the Hubble and James Webb telescopes, and built weather satellites. It became, through its own plants and a run of acquisitions culminating in the 2016 purchase of its British rival Rexam, the largest maker of aluminum beverage cans in the world. Then, in a move that tells you where it thinks the money is, it sold the rockets to keep the cans. In August 2023 Ball agreed to sell Ball Aerospace to the British defense contractor BAE Systems, and the deal closed in February 2024 for about $5.6 billion. The aerospace business became BAE Systems Space and Mission Systems. Ball kept the aluminum. A company that could build a space telescope decided the better business was the container.

Today Ball Corporation trades as BALL on the New York Stock Exchange and describes itself, in its own filings, as "the world's leading producer of sustainable aluminum packaging."

## The toll: it sells the container, not the drink

The scale is the thing to sit with. In its 2024 fiscal year Ball reported net sales of about $11.8 billion. Its continuing business, after the aerospace sale, is essentially one thing: cans. It ships them out of three regions, and the volume numbers are almost hard to picture. Ball shipped roughly 48 billion aluminum beverage containers in North and Central America in 2024, about 36 billion in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and roughly 19 billion in South America. That is on the order of 103 billion cans a year from the three main segments, plus about 1.5 billion aluminum aerosol and personal-care containers. Around 16,000 employees across roughly 64 plants turn aluminum coil into more than a hundred billion drink containers a year.

Its customers are exactly who you would guess. Ball's own 10-K names The Coca-Cola Company and Anheuser-Busch InBev under its customer-concentration risk, and states plainly that "we sell a majority of our packaging products to a relatively limited number of major beverage, personal care and household product companies." The giants of soda and beer are its accounts. When Coke and Pepsi and Bud fight for the shelf, Ball is selling cans to the combatants and does not much care who wins the battle, only that the war is fought in aluminum.

And here is the mechanism that makes it a toll rather than a gamble on aluminum prices. Ball does not eat the cost of the metal. Its 10-K spells it out: "we limit our exposure to changes in the cost of aluminum as a result of the inclusion of provisions in most of our aluminum beverage container sales contracts" that pass metal-price changes through to the customer. Read that carefully. The single biggest input cost, aluminum, is largely passed straight through to the beverage company. What Ball keeps is the spread on the conversion, the value it adds by turning a coil of metal into a formed, printed, seamed can. It is insulated from the price of aluminum and indifferent to the price of the soda. It gets paid to make the container, on volume, in the middle, which is the definition of a toll.

The position is protected by how few players there are. Ball is the largest producer in North and Central America, where its roughly 48 billion cans were about 34 percent of regional shipments, and the largest in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, with an estimated 39 percent of a market of about 93 billion cans. Its own filing notes that just five companies make substantially all of the aluminum beverage containers in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The rest of that short list is Crown Holdings, Ardagh Metal Packaging, and Canpack. This is not a fragmented commodity business with a thousand suppliers. It is a handful of giant firms feeding an entire continent's worth of beverage brands, and Ball is the biggest of them.

The profit is steadier than glamorous, which is the point. Ball's reported net earnings for 2024 look enormous at about $4 billion, but almost all of that is the one-time gain on selling the aerospace business, which sits in discontinued operations. The continuing can business tells the real story: comparable operating earnings of about $1.47 billion and comparable net earnings of about $977 million on that $11.8 billion of sales. A single-digit-to-low-double-digit margin, earned over and over on a hundred billion cans, from customers who cannot easily go anywhere else. That is a better business, in its boring way, than most of the brands it serves.

## The aluminum-versus-plastic pitch, and where it is honest

Ball does not sell the can only as a container. It sells it as the virtuous container, the answer to plastic, and this is worth pulling apart because part of it is true and part of it is marketing.

For years Ball's flagship consumer pitch was the Ball Aluminum Cup, a recyclable alternative to the red plastic party cup, made at a plant in Rome, Georgia. Ball described it, in its own 2023 annual report, as "infinitely recyclable," and its marketing site put the contrast bluntly: "infinitely recyclable, unlike single-use plastic cups, which wind up in landfills." The phrase "infinitely recyclable" ran through Ball's investor materials for years.

Two things then happened that are quietly telling. First, Ball got out of the cup itself, selling the aluminum-cup business into a joint venture in 2025. Second, and more interesting, Ball dropped "infinitely recyclable" from its most recent 10-K and replaced the slogan with numbers: "in 2023 the global aluminum recycling rate was 75 percent and, as of 2024, Ball beverage cans contained 74 percent recycled content on average." That is a more honest register, because "infinitely recyclable" is a fact about the metal, not about what actually happens to it.

So what actually happens to it? Here the aluminum case is genuinely strong, just not magic. Recycled aluminum makes up more than 80 percent of U.S. aluminum production, recycling it saves about 95 percent of the energy of making it new, and the Aluminum Association estimates about 75 percent of all the aluminum ever produced is still in use. Aluminum cans really are recycled at far higher rates than plastic bottles. The EPA's figures put aluminum beer and soft-drink cans at about 50 percent recycling versus about 29 percent for PET bottles and jars, and the Can Manufacturers Institute puts the can rate at 43 percent against 20 percent for PET. But the same Aluminum Association is candid that can recycling rates "have fallen below 50 percent in recent years." So the true statement is not "infinitely recyclable." It is "recycled about twice as often as plastic, and carrying a lot of recycled content, but still landfilling roughly half of them." Better than plastic, real, and nowhere near the closed loop the slogan implies. Ball's own retreat from the phrase says it knows the difference.

There is a cost to the virtue, too. An aluminum can costs more to make than a plastic bottle. The International Aluminium Institute's own comparison of container costs found that per litre, PET plastic is the cheapest material to package a drink in, glass is the most expensive, and aluminum sits in the middle. So the shift from plastic to aluminum is partly environmental and partly a move up the cost curve, which suits a can maker just fine.

## Canned water: the same markup, now wearing a halo

The cleanest place to watch the packaging story and the water story collide is the aluminum water can, because it is the bottled-water markup all over again, dressed in sustainability.

The breakout example is Liquid Death, which sells ordinary still "mountain water" and sparkling water in tall aluminum cans under the tagline "murder your thirst." It is a marketing company that happens to sell water. In March 2024 it raised $67 million at a valuation of about $1.4 billion, on reported 2023 retail sales of around $263 million. Its whole brand leans on the aluminum-versus-plastic contrast; its "Death to Plastic" page tells customers "aluminum is infinitely recyclable (plastic bottles are not)" and that "plastic is not technically recyclable anymore because it is no longer profitable to recycle." Other brands run the same play. Open Water sells water in aluminum bottles and cans marketed as "infinitely recyclable"; PathWater sells purified water in "reusable aluminum" bottles positioned against single-use plastic.

Strip the can away and it is the exact economics of the last article. The water is nearly free. The package is most of the cost. And the brand is the whole product. Liquid Death did not invent a better water. It put cheap water in a can, wrapped it in a heavy-metal joke and an anti-plastic conscience, and built a billion-dollar valuation on the packaging and the attitude. It is bottled-water markup with a different container and a cooler story, and the container, more likely than not, was made by one of the handful of firms in Ball's league. The toll gets collected whether the water is virtuous or not.

## What to take from this

**The container is the product, so find the company that makes the container.** In a market where the brands fight an expensive war for your attention, the steadier money is one layer down, in whoever supplies all of them. Ball walked away from mason jars and even from spacecraft to concentrate on being that supplier, because selling the can to every combatant beats being one of the combatants. When you see brands spending furiously to differentiate a near-identical product, look for the quieter firm selling the identical part to all of them. That firm is usually the better business.

**A pass-through cost plus a limited field of suppliers is a toll.** Ball's edge is not a secret formula. It is that it passes the price of aluminum through to its customers and operates in a market with only a handful of players big enough to serve a continent. It earns a spread on conversion, on enormous volume, from customers who cannot easily switch. That structure, cost passed through and competitors few, is the same engine under a lot of the tolls in this series. It is dull, and it compounds.

**"Sustainable" packaging is better than plastic and not a free pass.** Aluminum genuinely recycles at roughly twice the rate of plastic and carries a lot of recycled content, and that is a real advantage worth choosing. But "infinitely recyclable" describes the metal, not the roughly half of cans that still get landfilled, and Ball quietly swapped the slogan for the rate in its own filings. Treat the halo on a canned drink as a reason to feel a little better, not a reason to buy more of it. The greenest container is still the one you refill.

**The cheapest drink container is the one you already own.** Liquid Death is a masterclass in selling you cheap water at a premium by changing the container and the story. It works because a can, like a bottle, is a thing you can be sold over and over. A reusable bottle and your own tap end the transaction. As with the whole toll economy, and as [The W-2 Trap](https://thew2trap.com/) argues at book length, the move is to stop renting the container and buying back the thing you already have on tap.

## Related reading

- [Bottled Water Is Mostly Markup](/blog/bottled-water-is-mostly-markup/): the companion piece on how tap water becomes a branded product, and who owns the water brands.
- [The Toll Booth: the full index](/blog/the-toll-booth-index/): where the container toll sits among all the collectors who charge rent on things you cannot easily skip.
- [Hidden Schemes and How to Opt Out](/blog/hidden-schemes-and-how-to-opt-out/): the practical exit from the fees, premiums, and markups baked into everyday prices.
- [How Card Networks Get Paid](/blog/how-card-networks-are-paid/): another middle-of-the-transaction toll, collected on volume no matter whose product is bought.
- [The W-2 Trap and the Toll Economy](/blog/the-w2-trap-and-the-toll-economy/): the argument for owning the tolls instead of paying them.

## Fact-check notes and sources

Company history and financials come from Ball Corporation's own filings and investor releases; recycling and cost figures come from federal and industry sources. Where a figure is contested or could not be verified at a primary source, it is flagged here.

- **Founding and the jar business:** Ball was founded in 1880 in Buffalo, New York, by the five Ball brothers, incorporated as the Ball Brothers Manufacturing Company in 1886, and moved to Muncie, Indiana, around 1887, producing its first Muncie glass jars in 1888; the home-canning glass business was spun off as Alltrista Corporation in April 1993, which became Jarden (2002) and was acquired by Newell Brands (2016), which holds the license to the Ball trademark for home-canning jars today. Sources: [Ball Corporation history](https://www.ball.com/our-company/our-story/history-timeline) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_Corporation). Some early-history details rest on secondary sources because Ball's own timeline page and the older filings returned access errors on direct retrieval.
- **The aerospace sale:** Ball agreed on August 17, 2023, to sell Ball Aerospace to BAE Systems for about $5.6 billion in gross cash proceeds, closing February 16, 2024; the business became BAE Systems Space and Mission Systems. [Ball Investor Relations, "Ball Completes Sale of Aerospace Business"](https://investors.ball.com/news-presentations/press-releases/detail/18/ball-completes-sale-of-aerospace-business). Ball Aerospace had built instruments for the Kepler mission and the Hubble and James Webb telescopes. Ball became the largest global can maker in part through its 2016 acquisition of Rexam; the exact purchase price is reported variously and is not asserted here.
- **Scale and financials (fiscal year 2024):** net sales of about $11,795 million; comparable operating earnings of about $1,472 million; comparable net earnings of about $977 million; GAAP net earnings attributable to Ball of about $4,008 million, most of which is the one-time gain on the aerospace sale reported in discontinued operations, so the continuing can business earned far less on a GAAP basis (earnings from continuing operations were roughly $430 million). Segment sales: North and Central America about $5,619 million, EMEA about $3,466 million, South America about $1,951 million. Sources: [Ball Q4/full-year 2024 results](https://investors.ball.com/news-presentations/press-releases/detail/692/ball-reports-fourth-quarter-2024-results) and the [FY2024 Form 10-K](https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000009389&type=10-K) (SEC CIK 0000009389).
- **Volume, customers, and the aluminum pass-through:** Ball shipped approximately 48 billion aluminum beverage containers in North and Central America, 36 billion in EMEA, and roughly 19 billion in South America in 2024 (on the order of 103 billion across the three segments), employed about 16,000 people, and names The Coca-Cola Company and Anheuser-Busch InBev among its concentrated customer base; it states that it "limit[s] our exposure to changes in the cost of aluminum" via pass-through "provisions in most of our aluminum beverage container sales contracts." All from Ball's FY2024 Form 10-K, Item 1. Ball was the largest producer in North and Central America (about 34 percent of regional shipments) and in EMEA (about 39 percent of an approximately 93 billion container market); competitors named in reporting include Crown Holdings, Ardagh Metal Packaging, and Canpack ([Quartr, "Ball: The King of Cans"](https://quartr.com/insights/edge/ball-the-king-of-cans)).
- **Recyclability:** Ball called its aluminum cup "infinitely recyclable" in its [FY2023 10-K](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/9389/000155837024001349/ball-20231231x10k.htm) and on its cup marketing site, but its [FY2025 10-K](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/9389/000110465926017410/ball-20251231x10k.htm) replaces that phrase with "in 2023 the global aluminum recycling rate was 75 percent and, as of 2024, Ball beverage cans contained 74 percent recycled content on average," and notes competition from "plastic carbonated soft drink bottles." Real-world recycling rates: aluminum cans about 50.4 percent versus PET bottles and jars about 29.1 percent per the [EPA (2018 data)](https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/aluminum-material-specific-data); the [Can Manufacturers Institute](https://www.cancentral.com/sustainability/) puts the can rate at 43 percent versus 20 percent for PET; and the [Aluminum Association](https://www.aluminum.org/recycling) confirms the closed-loop advantages while acknowledging can rates "have fallen below 50 percent in recent years."
- **Container cost by material:** per litre, PET plastic is the cheapest material to package a drink in and glass the most expensive, with aluminum in the middle, per the [International Aluminium Institute's cost-competitiveness study](https://international-aluminium.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Cost-competitiveness-of-PET-aluminium-and-glass-beverage-containers-1.pdf).
- **Canned water:** Liquid Death raised $67 million at a roughly $1.4 billion valuation in March 2024 on about $263 million in 2023 retail sales, sells water in aluminum "tallboy" cans under the tagline "murder your thirst," and markets aluminum against plastic on its ["Death to Plastic" page](https://liquiddeath.com/pages/death-to-plastic) ([valuation via Wikipedia/Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Death)). [Open Water](https://www.drinkopenwater.com/) and [PathWater](https://pathwater.com/) similarly sell aluminum-packaged water on an anti-plastic pitch.

*This post is informational and journalistic, not investment advice. It describes a company's public filings and investor materials, federal and industry data, and named brands, all of which change over time. Mentions of specific companies and brands are nominative fair use, and no affiliation is implied.*


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