How To Open That Pesky Seal On Costco's Milk Gallons

You stumble into the kitchen in the morning still half-asleep and bleary-eyed, desperate for caffeine, when you pull out a new gallon of Costco milk for your coffee — it's only then that you realize you're going to have to do battle with its plastic pull-tab seal. Those seals with their semi-circular tabs are a source of endless frustration, as likely to rip off as you pull them without opening the jug as they are to work. But there is help to get past that annoying barrier keeping you from your milky wake-up coffee or tea — which you can make better by adding the milk before the boiling water.

The trick — contrary to what may seem logical — is to ignore the pull tab and focus on the edge of the foil that's sealed around the opening. Pick a spot where you can get a grip on the foil edge with your fingers and peel it back until the edges peel free. You can continue to just peel the whole thing off, or go back to the tab if it hasn't ripped off, and it will now be able to pull off the inner liner.

You can try another hack by using pliers — a narrow-nosed pair works best — to grab a foil edge and then roll it back across the opening. If all else fails, go with the brute force method a lot of exasperated people use: Grab a knife and plunge it through the top.

It's not just milk containers that can have those pesky seals, also called cap liners. You'll also find them on products like juices, condiments like ketchup — which celebrity chef Jacques Pepin likes to use in his cooking — and mustard, and non-food items like over-the-counter supplements. So why are they there? There are logical reasons like being better at keeping out bacteria, preventing the product from tampering with the products, and extending shelf life, which you can also do for milk by not storing it in the refrigerator door. But there's another messy explanation too.

Milk leaks out of containers with other closures, like screw-on plastic caps or glued flaps that open and form a spout. It puddles under the cartons or jugs onto the refrigerated store shelf, wetting the bottoms of the containers and sometimes getting on shoppers who pick them up. It also causes loss during shipping, so customers get a little bit less milk than what's supposed to be in the jug. The pull-tab inner liners have a better seal, which prevents that leakage.