Article URL: https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-cookware-got-worse-on-purpose Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49137904 Points: 29 # Comments: 17

One buyout firm quietly collected Pyrex, Corelle, Instant Pot, and Oneida. Farberware is a name on a 200-year lease. And the pans still worth buying. 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.