As a home canner looking for new recipes to try out, you might sometimes be inspired by commercial products found on grocery shelves. But even after scouring through all your recipe books, magazines, and online resources there are still some products for which you cannot find home canning recommendations. Why is this? What do these companies have that you don’t?

Well, in summary, companies have two things that home canning does not have: 1) special equipment and 2) lots of money for research.

Commercial facilities have industrial equipment that can reach higher temperatures more quickly than what can be achieved at home. With specialized equipment, they are also able to control the consistency and maturity of ingredients. This control reduces the variability of the canning process, which allows for more reliable research (and therefore more product development) than can be done for home-canning practices.

Companies pay to conduct expensive research in order to determine safe product formulas and processing methods for each and every product. Even if just one ingredient is added to an already approved product, that new recipe must be carefully tested before being manufactured for sale. Acidity levels, water activity, and heat penetration are all critical factors influencing processing times, and these factors vary greatly among different recipes.

Proper studies to establish processing times for both commercial and home-canned recipes are crucial to the safety of canned foods. Without proper processing times, there is significant risk of botulism resulting from under-processed canned foods, especially low acid foods. Experimentally determining safe processing times requires a lot of time and money, and there is no easy formula to take into account the way that each product heats in each canning situation. Commercial and home-canning processes are not interchangeable. That is why there are fewer recipes and processes for home canning than many people would like.

For more information about heat processing of home-canned foods, read this 'Backgrounder’ by Elaine M. D’sa.