What size jar
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Spice is the category where the jar and the contents disagree most sharply, because you declare a weight and you buy a volume, and the ratio between them changes with every material you pack.
Sold by weight, bought by volume
The label carries a net weight. The supplier's catalog carries fluid ounces or milliliters. Nothing reconciles them except bulk density, which for spice ranges from very dense crystalline salt to dried leaf that is mostly air.
The same 4 oz jar holds around 4 oz of fine salt and perhaps half an ounce of whole oregano. Both are correctly filled. Only one of them looks it.
The sizes the category actually uses
A small number of formats do most of the work. Around 2 oz by volume is the sampler and the gift-set size. The 4 oz jar is the retail default for ground spice and what a customer pictures when they think of a spice jar. Something near 8 oz serves the high-use materials, paprika and garlic and the blends people cook with daily. Anything larger is food service or a refill format rather than a shelf product.
Whole spices skew larger for the same weight, and leaf larger again.
Running one size or three
One size is much cheaper. One label die, one case configuration, one closure, one shelf footprint, and volume pricing on a single part instead of three.
It is also wrong at one end of the range. A single jar across a line containing both salt and leaf will look generous on one and mean on the other, and it will be the leaf that generates complaints.
The workable compromise for most small producers is two: a standard jar for ground and a larger one for leaf and whole, chosen so both look properly filled.
What to check before ordering
Fill a real sample of your actual product at your actual grind, let it settle overnight, and look at it the next morning. Settling is exactly what happens in transit, and the jar the customer opens is the settled one.
Check the closure fits and sifts your coarsest material, and check the label panel is big enough for a net weight, an ingredient list and an allergen statement without shrinking the type to something unreadable.
The sizes we stock
