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Dec 04, 2023

I Said Goodbye to Stale Snacks Thanks to This Viral TikTok Tool

By Alaina Chou All products featured on Epicurious are independently selected by

By Alaina Chou

All products featured on Epicurious are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

If you live alone, you’ll know that it can take a while to get through one bag of, say, TJ's crunchy curls or your favorite bagged popcorn. (Especially if, like me, you’re the kind of person who would rather eat a handful of, like, five different snacks instead of a big bowl of one thing.) I find that bag clips do a so-so job, at best, of keeping opened snacks fresh. And having piles of shoddily rolled-up chip bags definitely contributes to the chaos that is my kitchen snack drawer—yes, you’re likely to find a stray cheese cracker mingling with a loose cookie if you open my cabinets. Of course, I also worry about pests finding their way into all of open bags in my pantry when most are "sealed" only by a clip or rubber band.

At Epi, we’ve written about the benefits of decanting pantry items into their own airtight containers, and while that's a practice I’ve adopted for pantry staples like flour and sugar, it feels a bit ridiculous to give a bag of Doritos the obsessive organization blog treatment.

So you can imagine my excitement in coming across a handheld bag sealer on a recent scroll through TikTok. It was cute, compact, brightly colored, and a seemingly perfect solution to my stale snack problem. I headed to Amazon immediately, and I’m here to review it for you now.

Using the sealer is pretty intuitive: You slide a protective cover back to reveal a heating element, which won't heat up until you press the gadget's two sides together over the ends of the bag. The whole thing works kind of like a hair straightening iron for your bag. You can also use a switch to pop a (very, very small) blade out. This is supposed to be useful in opening bags you’ve resealed back up, but it's mostly unnecessary. You can just reopen the bags with your hands.

For some reason, the sealer comes with a small practice plastic baggie, even though learning to use it isn't rocket science. Still, my first try on the included bag did not go so smoothly. I was unable to get a firm grip on the device, and I burned through the plastic before I was able to create a proper seal on the bag's edges. But my experiments on actual chip bags fared far, far better. I was able to seal a half-eaten bag of Takis easily, and it was pretty satisfying.

I decided to truly take my new bag sealer to the test, comparing it side by side with the other bag sealing methods in my life: the classic bag clip and a rubber band. My test snack of choice? Cheesy popcorn, which tends to stale incredibly quickly. I opened three bags and then sealed them, using the bag sealer on one, the bag clip on the second, and a rubber band around the last. I stashed the bags in my pantry and waited two weeks before opening them again. It was as predicted: The bag sealed with the heat sealer was the freshest by far. The popcorn's crunch hadn't diminished seemingly at all since opening two weeks prior. The bag clip did an inferior-but-decent job, while the rubber band method yielded soggy, mushy popcorn.

Of course, a chip bag sealed after opening will never stay as fresh as one whose contents have never seen the light of day. But my new bag sealer has earned a permanent place in my kitchen drawer, and it ensures I’ll never have to worry about inedible stale snacks (or chip clip clutter) ever again.