The Cookware Industry Has a Major Fight Brewing Over PFAS Claims

The war over forever chemicals in cookware has seen celebrity chefs, major cookware makers, and state legislatures enter into battle. Now, a new front has opened over advertising claims.

Cookware company Caraway is alleging that “Big Cookware” is using a lawsuit to try to “silence” the company, which rose to prominence making forever-chemical-free pans. Caraway recently launched a marketing campaign in response to a lawsuit filed in February by two large pan makers, which claims that Caraway is harming their reputation by marketing its products as free of “toxic” chemicals—despite never mentioning either company by name.

The lawsuit, filed by Groupe SEB USA and Meyer in the Southern District of New York, claims that Caraway’s marketing around forever chemicals, a colloquial term for per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), is harmful to the industry as a whole. Caraway’s marketing materials, the two companies say in the suit, is not grounded in scientific fact and “has caused immense and continuing harm to consumers, to Plaintiffs, and to other cookware and bakeware companies in the marketplace.”

In response to questions from WIRED, Carmine Zarlenga, a lawyer at Mayer Brown representing Groupe SEB USA and Meyer in the case, sent over a press release. “Claiming to be a smaller company is no defense to false advertising—all companies large and small have the same rights and obligations under federal and state false advertising laws,” Zarlenga said in the release.

The lawsuit is the latest attack on anti-PFAS advocacy by two of the largest companies in the global cookware industry. In 2024, as more than two dozen state legislatures weighed bans on consumer products with PFAS in them, Groupe SEB, the parent company of Groupe SEB USA, and Meyer formed the Cookware Sustainability Alliance, an advocacy group for the industry. That group has actively opposed bans, including signing letters and testifying in statehouses.

Last fall, facing a bill in the California legislature to ban consumer products containing PFAS, celebrity chefs, including Rachael Ray, Marcus Samuelsson, and David Chang sent letters to the legislature opposing the bill. (Ray and Chang have cookware lines affiliated with Meyer, while Samuelsson serves as a “chef partner” for All-Clad, which is owned by Groupe SEB. WIRED sought comment from All Clad, Ray, Samuelsson, and Chang. All four did not respond.) The bill ultimately passed the legislature but was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom.

“The Cookware Sustainability Alliance focuses on state-level advocacy to protect perfectly safe cookware from being swept into overly broad PFAS product bans,” the group’s president, Steve Burns, told WIRED in an email. “We are not a party to any lawsuit at this point.”

Last year, the Cookware Sustainability Alliance challenged claims made by Caraway through the National Advertising Division (NAD), an independent nonprofit that is often linked with the Better Business Bureau National Programs that self-polices the ad industry. The alliance challenged some of the claims in Caraway’s advertising around PFAS.

The NAD ruled that Caraway could continue to advertise its products as “nontoxic” and “PFAS-free,” but it should avoid specific claims in its advertising, including that other nonstick cookware “can release toxins into your food and home during ordinary, manufacturer-recommended use.”

Caraway, the February lawsuit alleges, continued to use that messaging despite the NAD decision. The company says that most examples of advertising highlighted in the lawsuit simply state that its products are nontoxic and that it fully complied with the NAD’s recommendations. But the suit also claims that Caraway “has not taken down many of the relevant advertisements.” In a memo to support a dismissal motion, Caraway alleged the NAD did not provide “any factual support whatsoever to the element of consumer deception.”