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Baggies


Pressure seal bags are bags made of plastic with a sealing strip made of two interlocking profiles at the filling opening, with which the bag can be sealed almost airtight. The bag can be easily opened and closed again and is thus reusable.

But there have also been some new innovations since the bags were patented in 1954.
There are bags with funny prints or even double-sealable ones for particularly smelly products.

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0,99 1,19 incl. VAT
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0,89 0,99 incl. VAT
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1,88 1,99 incl. VAT
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0,79 - 0,89 incl. VAT
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0,79 - 0,89 incl. VAT
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0,89 - 0,99 incl. VAT
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1,49 1,99 incl. VAT
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1,99 2,99 incl. VAT
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7,90 - 8,90 incl. VAT
-34%

Buy Baggies at Donaulife Headshop

HISTORY OF THE RESEALABLE ZIP-LOCK BAG

As with all great inventions and innovations - from sliced bread to smartphones - once they become widely established, it becomes difficult to remember a world in which they did not exist. Zip-lock bags are the perfect example of this phenomenon.
Although they have only been around for just over half a century, they are now found everywhere - and they do indeed have a thousand and one practical uses.
These ubiquitous resealable bags, used for packing, storing, shipping and organising, now come in a wide variety of styles and sizes. But where do they come from and how did they evolve into the range of products we know and use today?

In 1951, an inventor named Borge Madsen filed a patent for a plastic zip that was the forerunner of the zip-lock bag we know today. His original design was a little more complex than today's version (it had two "engagement areas" instead of the one we use today) and it looked more like a traditional zip with a tab, except that it had no teeth and was made of plastic. That same year, a company called Flexigrip was formed to develop and market a product based on Madsen's invention, whose patents it had acquired. Among the first applications was for use in high-speed binders and flat file cases. The cost of manufacturing the "tab" style plastic zips initially prevented widespread consumer use, but then Steven Ausnit - one of the founders of the family-owned Flexigrip company - came up with the idea of a "press-and-seal" zip. This is the most common type of zip used for bags today. Until then, Flexigrip had used a heat-sealing process to attach string-zipper profiles to film before making them into pouches. The industry calls these "post-applied zip bags" because the zip is not integrated into the original bag film. A major leap in the development of the zip bag came in 1959 when Ausnit learned of a Japanese company - Seisan Nihon Sha - that had developed a new manufacturing process that allowed the zip profiles to be extruded into the polyethylene film from which the bags are made - an innovation that cut manufacturing costs by half. In the industry, these are known as "integrated zip bags" or "integral zip bags".

In 1961, the Flexigrip company acquired the licensing rights to the new "integral zip" process and founded another company called Minigrip to market the now inexpensively produced zip-lock bags. Minigrip focused primarily on industrial bags with a coloured trademark - a thin "Red Line" above the zip. Around 1964, Minigrip secured an exclusive licensing agreement with the Dow Chemical Company to market Ziplock bags in grocery shops and supermarkets. The now well-known consumer brand Ziploc® was launched and widely marketed in 1968. It took a few years for the product to really catch on, but by the early 1970s, the Ziploc® brand bag had become enormously popular and was used by consumers for everything from storing sandwiches for school lunches to transporting goldfish home from the pet shop. Dow Chemical eventually sold the rights to its Dow brands, including Ziploc®, to S.C. Johnson Company in 1997. Over the years, other consumer brands began to appear on the market under the names Hefty, Glad-Lock and various other private labels. However, the Ziploc® brand remains the largest and best known of all the consumer brand Ziplock bags.

In 1978, Minigrip was acquired by Signode, Inc. In 1987, Signode was acquired by ITW and Minigrip became a subsidiary of ITW.
Until 2006, ITW Minigrip manufactured all of its industrial RED LINE™ bags at a facility in Seguin, Texas. When the original Minigrip patents for the "integrated zip" expired in the mid-1980s, many companies began importing similar bags from China and other parts of Asia due to cheaper manufacturing and resin costs.
ITW Minigrip began to lose market share and the market for industrial zip-lock bags became highly fragmented as many importers entered the game. To compete with the flood of imported bags, ITW Minigrip bought a factory in Thailand and moved production of all its industrial zip-lock bags there in 2006.
Between 2008 and 2011, ITW Minigrip began acquiring some of the larger importers to consolidate the industrial bag market. In 2012, Minigrip was acquired by Inteplast Group, a major importer and domestic manufacturer of all types of industrial, retail and medical plastic bags. Minigrip is now a subsidiary of Inteplast Group.

FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS AND EVOLUTION

Today, there are two basic types of closure found in both consumer brands and industrial wholesale brands: the "Tab" or "Slider Lock" zip bags, which are very similar to Madsen's original invention, and the "Press-and-Seal" bags, which are the most common. The more expensive "Tab" or "Slider Lock" zip bags are useful in situations where the user needs to wear gloves or where the user's hands can become slippery from oil or grease. These are also typically used for cigars and loose tobacco, as well as for food storage, such as deli pouches. Along with closure types, there have also been many developments in film structure, including modifications for improved retail presentation and longer shelf life in food storage.
Most cheese packaging found in grocery shops uses a laminated film structure with zips attached afterwards, with tamper evident security features above the zip. Laminated zip pouches are widely used in food retailing. More and more food products - and even products such as detergents - are being packaged in pouches, which the industry refers to as "stand-up pouches". In addition to the familiar zip, most of these pouches also contain a tear strip to ensure tamper-evidence. The advantages of this type of zip-lock bag are twofold: convenience for the customer and cost savings over traditional retail packaging.

There are now hundreds of patents for individual zip-lock bags and there are a virtually unlimited number of applications and uses for the bags. The larger markets that use resealable zip-lock bags include: Industrial, Medical, Craft, Jewellery, Toys, Hobby, Hardware, Tobacco, Retail, Food Packaging, Food Storage, Electrical Appliances and others.