Food storage containers: we used six sets for eighteen months and the lids decided everything

I bought six sets and used them as my only containers for eighteen months, through roughly two hundred dishwasher cycles each.

The lid is the product

The body of a food container is a solved problem. Glass or plastic, it holds food, and after eighteen months every body in this test was serviceable apart from cosmetic scratching.

The lids are where everything happens. Four of the six sets had lids that no longer sealed reliably by month twelve — the silicone gasket had hardened, or the clips had lost their spring, or the lid itself had warped enough that one corner lifted.

A container that does not seal is a plate with ambitions. That is the whole review.

Glass against plastic

Glass wins on staining, smell retention and going in the oven. It loses on weight and on the obvious failure mode.

Plastic wins on weight and on not shattering when a tired person drops one at 11pm. It loses on staining — tomato defeats every plastic container eventually — and on warping, which is the main cause of lid failure above.

I ended up with glass bodies for things I reheat and plastic for things I carry. That is not a compromise so much as an admission that these are two different jobs.

What actually predicted survival

Replaceable gaskets. Two sets sold replacement silicone separately. Those are the two sets still sealing, because I replaced the gaskets at about fourteen months for a few pounds. The other four became landfill at the same point.

That is the single most useful thing in this piece: buy a set whose maker sells replacement gaskets, and buy the gaskets before you need them.

Lid-down dishwasher placement. Warping correlated strongly with how hot the lid got. Bottom-rack lids warped; top-rack lids mostly did not.

Fewer clips. Four-clip lids failed more often than two-clip lids, because each clip is a failure point and the four-clip designs relied on all four.

What I would buy

A mid-priced set with replaceable gaskets, in two sizes rather than eight, glass for the reheating ones.

The eight-piece sets are a trap. You use two sizes constantly and the other six live in a cupboard being an obstacle.

The unglamorous conclusion

Nothing here justified its premium on materials. The expensive set failed at month thirteen like most of the others, and the thing that separated the survivors was a two-pound silicone ring you can buy separately.

Check for that before you check anything else.