How Reddit complaints led this brand to finally make a lid for its 144-year-old cleaner

It would be hard to overstate the ardor Reddit users display for Bar Keeper’s Friend, the 144-year-old cleanser brand. Subreddits including r/CleaningTips, r/cookware, and r/StainlessSteelCooking, are effusive about the abrasive, with users posting before-and-after photos of pans, sinks, and candlesticks that have been transformed from unsightly to gleaming with a couple shakes of the stuff and a bit of elbow grease.

But the Reddit community has been decidedly less impressed with the product’s packaging, the composite paperboard can with a shaker-top also used by old-school cleanser counterparts Ajax, Comet and Bon Ami. Its container has no lid, meaning that once users peel the sticker off the top, there’s nothing to prevent the product from spilling out if the can is knocked over or, in especially humid climates, from the powder occasionally clumping.

The primary reason the product is lidless is cost, Felicia Zhang, head of marketing at Bar Keeper’s Friend, told Retail Brew. The product, she said, retails for “under $3 at most places” (including Walmart and The Home Depot as of this writing), and a lid would add to the cost. Also, while the brand puts its soft cleanser in plastic bottles, the package for its original product is plastic-free, and the brand wanted to keep it that way.

“We’re very conscious of that particular SKU not having any plastic,” Zhang said, adding the flagship product is “our largest selling SKU, and we want it to be something that would be good environmentally.”

Lacking lids, Redditors have suggested myriad hacks to cover the product, with some noting a Pringles’ can lid is a decent fit, others recommending flexible-fit silicone covers from Ikea, yet others suggesting a disposable rubber glove over the top (which paradoxically does not fit like a glove), and the truly committed vouching for printing a lid with a 3D printer.

Now Bar Keeper’s Friend finally has a solution: a lid that fits snugly, is not plastic, and will not add to the retail cost of the product.

The brand recently developed a silicone lid embossed with the Bar Keeper’s Friend logo, and announced on social media that, in honor of being 144 years old, it would give out 144 of them a day from May 7–13 through a sweepstakes promotion.

“Put a lid on it!” the brand wrote in announcing the new lid on its website. “You asked. We listened.”

Cap and trade: Like Silly Putty, Post-It Notes, and Play-Doh, the invention of Bar Keeper’s Friend was an apocryphal-sounding accident. In 1882, as the brand tells it, George William Hoffman, an Indianapolis chemist, noticed that after he cooked up a batch of rhubarb, his once-tarnished cookware was gleaming. Eventually he discovered the cause was oxalic acid, a compound found in rhubarb, spinach, and other plants.

Once Hoffman had formulated a cleansing powder with the ingredient, he pitched it to saloon owners, whose establishments were known for their brass rails and copper kettles, which accounts for the product’s name. Its logo is meant to evoke saloon doors—albeit less obviously today after updates over the generations—the kind that swing open when the new sheriff in town enters the saloon and the piano stops mid-note.

Historically the brand has done little by way of advertising or marketing.

“It’s grown for 144 years, mainly through word of mouth,” said Zhang, who has been more intentional with the brand’s marketing efforts. The brand sponsored the World Food Championships when it was held in its hometown of Indianapolis in 2024, and in 2025 it sponsored a vintage holiday market for New York’s Housing Works—the peg being that the product could help keep antique purchases shiny.

The lid promotion, Zhang said, marks another effort to give the sort of burnishing to its brand that it’s long given to cookware.

“We’re doing more as we’re trying to spread the word about Bar Keeper’s Friend,” she said.

Now, for both promotional and practical purposes, the brand is deciding how best to get more of those lids in circulation.

“We’re first probably going to launch it as part of a bundle, where you can buy the powder and you’ll get a lid,” Zhang said. In other words, the lid is not for sale as such yet, but “we may explore it as a standalone [product] down the line.”

For now, the brand is focusing on the message that when fans complained, it took action.

“The new lid is something that I just wanted to be a nod to everyone that has supported and loved Bar Keeper’s,” Zhang said. “We’re here for you, we’re listening to you, and we’re here to help.”