The Cookware Industry Has a Major Fight Brewing Over PFAS Claims
Key takeaways
- 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.
- 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.
- The lawsuit is the latest attack on anti-PFAS advocacy by two of the largest companies in the global cookware industry.
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Photograph: Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story. 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.”