Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose

A couple of years ago, the small All-Clad pan I fry eggs in cut me as I was pulling it out of the dishwasher. A clean slice on my index finger off the rim. I patched it up. Didn’t think much else of it. I discovered what actually happened while researching this essay, sitting in a settlement archive three years too late to file a claim.

All-Clad had been selling its American-made stainless pans as dishwasher safe. In the dishwasher, the bonded rims corroded until the exposed edge got sharp enough to easily slice through skin. The company settled in 2023, capped at $4 million for a class covering seven and a half years of national sales, a rounding error for its French owner.

Anyone who bought a D3, D5, or LTD pan between January 2015 and July 2022 was in the class. If your pan was damaged, the deal was actually fine: a replacement plus $75, or, my favorite option on the menu, a trade of your damaged American-made pan for a set of nonstick ones made in China.

What never got fixed was the pan. Nothing was re-engineered to survive a dishwasher; the words "dishwasher safe" just came off the box, and the product pages recommend handwashing now. The claims window closed in April 2023 with most of the class, me included, never knowing it existed. Nobody mailed a postcard about the metallurgy.

I still use the pan. It's a good pan. But it turns out the cut on my finger had a paper trail, and so does nearly everything else in the cabinet. The cookware aisle runs on old names and new owners. With all of the mergers and asset handoffs, mapping who owns what in cookware was the most challenging of all the markets I’ve covered so far. Here’s the summary.

Centre Lane Partners, a private equity firm, owns Pyrex, Corelle, CorningWare, Snapware, Visions, Chicago Cutlery, Instant Pot, Anchor Hocking, Lenox, Oneida, and Reed & Barton. That is almost all of the surviving legacy American tabletop industry under one roof, and we'll come back to it, because that story is a doozy.

Groupe SEB, the French conglomerate behind T-fal, bought All-Clad in 2004, WMF in 2016, Lagostina, the Emeril license, and, as of January 2025, de Buyer, the French carbon steel maker everyone recommends as the antidote to enshittification (let’s see what their new owners do with that reputation). SEB announced up to 2,100 job cuts this February, with German outlets reporting three plants on the block.

Meyer, a family-owned manufacturing giant out of Vallejo and Thailand, makes over 120,000 pans a day that almost never say Meyer on them: Farberware cookware, KitchenAid cookware, Rachael Ray, Circulon, Anolon. The KitchenAid pots at Target have the mixer company's name and Meyer's Thai steel.

Newell Brands bought Calphalon in 1998, promised nothing would change. It moved production to China, and closed the last American Calphalon plant outside Toledo at the end of 2023, 130 jobs. Newell is the company that did the same to Mirro in Manitowoc two decades earlier, and this April Manitowoc sued Newell for $6 million to clean up the mess it left.

American Securities, another private equity firm, bought Conair in 2021, and Cuisinart with it. Cuisinart's food processors were already the subject of the largest kitchen appliance recall in CPSC history, 8 million units whose aging blades cracked and shed metal into food, with 69 reports of fragments and 30 injured mouths.

Lifetime Brands owns or rents nearly everything else with a dead founder's name on it: Farberware kitchenware and knives, Mikasa, Pfaltzgraff, the American license for Sabatier. It manufactures almost nothing. Its one growth business in a money-losing 2025 was Dolly Parton housewares, up 150 percent.

The problem with buying from any of the above is the incentive underneath the label. When a brand changes hands this many times, the name becomes the product and the pan becomes a cost to be managed beneath it: thinner steel here, an offshored handle there, a warranty rewritten by lawyers instead of engineers, and so on…

Nobody has run this playbook with more gusto than Centre Lane. Run it all the way out and the ending looks like this: one firm holding most of the surviving legacy American tableware names, a state monopoly case grinding through discovery, and the plant that made Pyrex for 132 years standing empty in western Pennsylvania.

Pyrex was materials science before it was a brand. Corning invented it in 1915: borosilicate glass that shrugged off thermal shock. It is the reason three generations learned to take a dish from the freezer to the oven without a second thought.

One important aside about the product before the money story starts. The American Pyrex on shelves today is tempered soda-lime glass, a different material with a thermal safety margin an American Ceramic Society analysis described as borderline, roughly 55°C of headroom against 183°C for borosilicate. Consumer Reports collected 163 shattering incident reports, 42 of them involving injuries. European Pyrex, made by an unrelated company, is still borosilicate. The switch happened under Corning itself, decades before the buyouts. That is exactly what made the brand such a perfect acquisition: the glass had already been downgraded, the reputation had not.

In 1998 Corning sold the consumer business to an affiliate of Borden, then a KKR portfolio company, in a deal worth about $603 million. The new company borrowed $471.6 million on day one and paid Corning a $472.6 million dividend, which means it was born owing more than it had. It renamed itself World Kitchen, bought more brands with more debt, and went bankrupt by 2002. To dig out, it sold the one thing in the portfolio still growing, OXO, for $273 million.

Cornell Capital, a private equity firm founded by a former Goldman Sachs vice chairman, bought the company in 2017 and renamed it Corelle Brands. In 2019 it merged with the Canadian company behind the Instant Pot, valuing the combination at $615 million. What it actually bought is disputed to this day. More than 98 percent of the price was booked as goodwill and intangibles, and within days of closing a Cornell partner on the new board emailed the CEO to ask, "Is there fraud going on???"

The suspicion, later spelled out in court filings, was that Instant Pot's sales had been pumped up with discounts and channel stuffing before the sale. The CEO's own verdict was that he was running "the most poorly operated 'successful' business on the planet."

Cornell held on to the asset anyway, and two years later, it got its money out. On April 12, 2021, Instant Brands borrowed $450 million. On April 21, it paid a $345 million dividend, roughly $200 million of that to Cornell Capital and its co-investors. The solvency memo blessing the payout assumed new product sales would grow more than 900 percent. In the end, actual sales missed that year's projections by $157 million. In June 2023 the company filed for Chapter 11, and the lenders that were collectively owed $391 million recovered between seven and nine cents on the dollar.

The bankruptcy is how we know all of this. The court appointed a litigation trustee to claw money back for the people left holding the bag. In November 2024 he sued Cornell Capital and its founder for more than $400 million, laying out the fraud email, the solvency memo, and the dividend math in an 88-page complaint. Cornell calls the suit baseless, and the case is grinding through a New York bankruptcy court right now.

Centre Lane bought the wreckage out of the bankruptcy and folded it into Anchor Hocking, the Ohio glassmaker it already owned. Two names matter from here. Anchor Hocking is the glassmaker: the plant in Lancaster, the name on the bakeware. Centre Lane is the owner: the New York firm that decides what happens to it.

Within six months of the purchase, Anchor Hocking announced that Pyrex production would leave Charleroi, Pennsylvania, the plant that had made it since 1893, and consolidate in Lancaster. Roughly 300 people worked at Charleroi.

Pennsylvania fought the closure and lost. Senator Bob Casey alleged the purchase had been structured to duck antitrust review: two-thirds of Corelle bought for $38.5 million, flipped into Anchor Hocking days later at $79.8 million. The state's attorney general sued to keep the plant open, alleging the combined company controls more than 91 percent of American glass bakeware. The judge declined to block the shutdown, and the monopoly case is still in discovery while the thing it was meant to prevent has already happened.

When offered relocation to the Ohio plant, four of the 300 said yes. The last piece of glass came off 114 kiln on April 11, 2025, and the plant whistle blew for 132 seconds, one for each year it was operational. A French industrial glassmaker tried to buy the empty plant last summer and reportedly couldn't get it past the FTC. Lawmakers say the FTC wants want consumer glass made there or nothing.

Tony Payne, an engineer who spent 36 years inside the plant, told the Mon Valley Independent that "fifty percent of Pyrex is now being made outside of Anchor because they can't make it." That claim is his alone, but there is precedent for what happens to the label when Pyrex gets made elsewhere: in January 2023, under the previous owner, the FTC made the company pay for stamping Made in USA on Pyrex measuring cups that came from China. Even the lawyers had to chase the owner. Jones Day sued Centre Lane for $9.6 million in unpaid legal bills this February, naming Anchor Hocking and Corelle Brands among the co-defendants. They settled confidentially last week.

Anchor Hocking itself has run this gauntlet several times: a hostile takeover by Newell in 1987, Cerberus into bankruptcy by 2006, then Monomoy Capital, which bought it for about $75 million, borrowed against it and charged it fees, before the whole thing went bankrupt again in 2015. Brian Alexander wrote a fantastic book about what two decades of financial engineering did to Lancaster, Ohio, called Glass House. His summary of the Monomoy years holds for the entire industry: they "put a little money in and pulled a wagonload of money out."

Under Centre Lane's ownership, the extraction tactics found their final form. In 2023 Anchor Hocking sold its own factory, the building responsible for nearly all of its production, and leased it back for 25 years. Three different owners have now monetized the same plant. The people of Lancaster still work in it. They just don't own any of it, and neither, anymore, does their employer.

Lancaster at least still has its factory. The purer version of the same move is to close the factory outright and keep nothing but the name. The cleanest example of that strategy is Farberware.

S.W. Farber's plant in the Bronx made Farberware pans from 1900 until 1996, when two buyers carved up the company, shut the plant for good, and moved production to Indonesia. Because those buyers filed their paperwork with the SEC, we know exactly what a beloved American brand is worth once the factory attached to it is gone.

Meyer paid $25.5 million, once, for an exclusive worldwide license to put the Farberware name on cookware for a term of 200 years. Not a typo. The lease runs to the year 2196. Nobody alive will see it expire, and nobody involved will ever make a Farberware pan in the Bronx again.

Once you understand the brand licensing structure, you see it everywhere, and the pattern is always the same: one company owns the name, a different company makes the product, and the factory that earned the name is liquidated. Chicago Cutlery began as a knife shop in Chicago and later made its knives in Wauconda, Illinois. Centre Lane owns the name today, and every knife under it is made in China. Sabatier, the storied French knife name, was never one company to begin with, and today more than 30 unrelated firms have rights to it. The Sabatier on American shelves is rented by Lifetime Brands and made in China. Revere Ware rode along in the same Corning spinoff as Pyrex, lost its Illinois plant in 1999, and was discontinued so quietly that the enthusiasts who sell replacement parts had to break the news. Pfaltzgraff made stoneware in York County, Pennsylvania from the early 1800s on. Lifetime Brands bought the brand for $32.5 million in 2005 and deliberately left the pottery out of the deal. Roughly 250 workers got 60-day notices, and the name went to Asia without them.

The Stanley on the viral tumbler and the Stanley on the tape measure are different companies that have shared a name for decades under negotiated truces. The tumbler side belongs to PMI, a Seattle firm that bought the drinkware brand in 2002. TikTok took its Quencher from $73 million to $750 million in annual sales in four years. In December 2024 the CPSC recalled 2.6 million of its travel mugs after lids came off hot and burned 38 people. Two months later, Stanley Black & Decker sued PMI, arguing the new "Stanley 1913" branding breaks the old agreements that kept the two Stanleys out of each other's lanes. The name is the asset worth suing over. The product is the thing that got recalled.

Tupperware ends the same way. It went bankrupt in 2024 and now belongs to a lender group that includes Alden Global Capital, the fund best known for strip-mining American newspapers. Its last American plant, in Hemingway, South Carolina, closed within months, taking 148 jobs. Production moved to Mexico.

The old brands took decades to get worse. The new ones started worse and spent the difference on ads. Four brands define the tier: Caraway, Our Place, HexClad, and Great Jones. All of them launched in the late 2010s, all of them manufacture in China, and all of them built their businesses on marketing spend rather than materials.

Caraway and Our Place sell the pastel pans: aluminum bodies under a ceramic "sol-gel" nonstick coating, pitched as the healthy alternative to Teflon. The materials science on that coating is peer-reviewed and brutal. A 2025 study ran five commercial ceramic coatings against ordinary PTFE across 90 simulated cooking cycles, and PTFE held its release performance the whole way while the best ceramics quit somewhere between cycle 30 and 60. Cook eggs daily and that is a pan with a working life that is measured in months. Both companies put that lifespan in the paperwork. Caraway covers its coating for one year. Our Place covered its coating for one year too, until May 2025, when it extended coverage on new purchases to three years after complaints about early coating failure had piled up in public. Let’s see how those claims end up being serviced.

Since the pans can't win on durability, Caraway sells fear of the alternative, and the consequences of that strategy have gotten expensive. Last August the ad industry's self-regulator ordered it to drop claims that ordinary nonstick releases toxins into your food, along with an unsupported claim about a "rise in Teflon flu." Caraway kept pushing, and this February the owners of All-Clad and Farberware sued it in federal court over the toxicity marketing. When the conglomerates from the first half of this essay are the ones calling your health claims false, you have accomplished something notable.

HexClad, the Gordon Ramsay brand, ran the fear play with a different surface and got caught more directly. Its "hybrid" pans were marketed as non-toxic and PFAS-free while containing PTFE, which is a PFAS. The class action settled this February: 209,712 people filed claims and got about six dollars each. Judged purely as a pan, America's Test Kitchen found the laser-etched surface failed at releasing an egg. Durable enough to survive steel wool, unable to do the one job nonstick exists for.

Great Jones compressed the whole VC-funded DTC extraction formula into four years: media-darling launch in 2019, a cofounder war that saw all six full-time employees quit by late 2020, and a quiet 2023 absorption by Meyer, the licensing giant from earlier in this story. The $160 Dutchess dutch oven is made in China with a chipping problem the reviews documented from early on, an issue I can attest to personally.

One DTC brand deserves the exception flag. Made In never raised the money that ruins these companies. Its documented funding totals about $8.3 million, against roughly $70 million at Caraway and the $100 million Gordon Ramsay's studio put behind HexClad. The founders still run it. A company that can't afford to buy its customers has to earn them, so the budget went into the product: family-owned partner factories in France and Italy plus American mills, a win in America's Test Kitchen's stainless rankings, and pans in actual restaurants. Its nonstick warranty even admits the coatings are "consumable by nature", which is perhaps the most honest sentence published by any cookware company this decade. Buy their stainless and carbon steel and treat every nonstick pan from anyone, at any price, as a consumable.

The counter-list in this category runs deeper than any I've covered previously, because cookware is simple enough that stubborn, family-run businesses can still compete. The pattern in who survived is uniform: nobody outside the family has ever been owed a return.

On glass bakeware, the unfortunate truth is that both American options are soda-lime. If you want borosilicate, buy European Pyrex online or thrift the old stuff.

Every brand named in this essay, and 89 in total from this research, now has an entry in the kitchen section of The Brand Ledger: who owns it, where it's made, the verdict, and what would change my mind. When an owner changes or a verdict moves, subscribers hear first.

Everything above reduces to four rules you can run in about two minutes, standing in the aisle: