Original research
We scored 73 products from Australia’s biggest general retailers on materials. Kogan came first at 44.1 out of 100. Big W came last. Target’s materials field sometimes contains a product code, and one Anko listing claims to be made from “BPA-safe” materials.
We scored 73 products sold by Australia’s biggest general retailers — 66 of them from the four chains that sell their own house brands — on one question: what are they made of? Not whether they are safe — we have no laboratory and will not pretend to — but what the manufacturer and the retailer actually tell you about the material that touches your food.
The ranking that came out is not the one we expected.
| Retailer | Products scored | Average materials score | Food surface named | Scoring zero |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kogan | 13 | 44.1 | 7 | 1 |
| Kmart | 23 | 35.2 | 8 | 3 |
| Target | 9 | 25.6 | 3 | 1 |
| Big W | 21 | 19.9 | 4 | 5 |
“Food surface named” counts products where the surface touching your food is identified at least to a material family — a named steel, a named glass, a named ceramic. “Scoring zero” means we looked and found no material stated anywhere at all. The Australian table as a whole — 168 products, including the specialist brands — averages 39.9.
The appliance specialists sit outside that league table on purpose. Betta and JB Hi-Fi average 8.0 across 7 products — lower than any of the four above — but they sell other companies’ appliances rather than a house brand, so that figure measures Ninja, Philips, Russell Hobbs and Westinghouse rather than the shop. The sample is also small. It is worth knowing for a different reason: Betta’s product feed has a field for coating material, and on the Tefal Easy Fry & Pizza somebody filled it in with “Removable pan PTFE”. Tefal’s own marketing for that product says “non-stick”. It is the only case we found in either country of a retailer disclosing more than the manufacturer.
Australia has no disclosure law for cookware. The Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code has no standard listing which materials or coatings cookware may be made from, and there is no Australian equivalent of California’s AB 1200, which forces cookware sold there to list intentionally added chemicals on the maker’s website. So an Australian retailer can sell you a coated pan and never name the coating, and most of them do.
Kogan is the only mainstream Australian retailer we found naming a fluoropolymer at the point of sale. Its 10L Dual Zone air fryer carries a spec row reading “Divider & Plates: Iron-coated PTFE”. The phrasing is garbled and the marketing copy above it says only “Non-stick removable pot” — but the spec table tells you, and nobody else’s does.
Its exclusive cookware brand Ovela goes further in wording than anyone: “Free from harmful chemicals like PTFE and PFOA”. Naming PTFE specifically is the thing almost every “PFOA-free” line is carefully built to avoid. And the Ovela 9-piece stainless set names its alloy — 304 — with stainless handles and glass lids and no plastic anywhere. It is the highest-scoring cookware in this whole Australian table at 85/100.
None of it is verified by anybody. Kogan publishes no laboratory, no standard and no report for any claim, and its company-level product safety page names no standard either — “our extremely high product safety standards” are not published anywhere. The phrase “inspected by third party professional inspectors during production” is easy to read as independent lab testing. It is production quality control.
Kogan also runs two disclosure standards under one roof. Its Ovela cookware makes PFAS-class claims; its own-brand air fryers make no chemical claim at all.
This is worth knowing before you compare them. Target Australia’s own-brand kitchenware is Anko — the same house brand as Kmart. Both are Wesfarmers’ Kmart Group, confirmed in the Kmart Group Ethical Sourcing Code hosted on Target’s own domain, which covers “Kmart Australia, Target Australia and Anko Global”. Buying the Target version instead of the Kmart one gets you the same supplier.
Kmart’s disclosure is wildly inconsistent rather than uniformly bad, which is its own kind of tell. A $9 glass bento box names “Body: Borosilicate glass. Lid: Polypropylene (PP).” — the most specific material statement we found anywhere in Australian mass retail. A $20 oven-rated glass storage set does not name the glass at all. A $4.50 collapsible lunchbox breaks out body, lid and fork separately. Four air fryers name nothing whatsoever.
The template can do it. Whether it gets filled in appears to depend on the supplier, not the product.
Target adds a twist. Its listing template has a dedicated field labelled “Materials and Composition”, which is genuinely better than most. On four products we checked it contains an internal product code instead of a material: “5PCE STONE GREY COOKSET”, “5PC S/S TRIPLY C/WARE”, “3PCE N/S COOKSET”, “12PC GLASS FOOD STORAGE”.
And on the one product where Target does name a cookware coating, it names something that cannot be one. The Anko Linear frypan lists “Coating: Polypropylene glycol (PPG)”. Polypropylene glycol is a liquid polyether used as a surfactant, antifoam and lubricant. It cannot form a non-stick frypan surface. “PPG” is almost certainly PPG Industries — the coatings supplier — typed into a chemical field. The same listing gives the handle twice, as “Thermoplastic rubber (TPR)” and as “silicone coated bakelite”.
Our favourite Anko listing, though, is the $8 set of seven food storage containers. It names no material at all — and claims to be made using “BPA-safe materials”. Not BPA-free. BPA-safe, which is not a recognised term and which, read plainly, could mean it contains BPA at a level someone has deemed acceptable. Every other Anko plastic product says “BPA free”. Only this one says this.
One more, because it is simply impossible: Kmart’s 3-piece carbon steel set says the pans are carbon steel and also that they are “not compatible with induction cooktops”. Carbon steel is ferromagnetic. It works on induction by definition. One of those two statements is wrong.
Big W averages 19.9 across 21 products, and the reason is simple: across Brilliant Basics cookware and all three Contempo air fryers — the cheapest, highest-volume, most family-bought lines it sells — the only word describing the food-contact surface is “non-stick”.
Its Masterclass 5-piece cookware set at $62 is the worst single listing we found in Australia. The entire description is that the set includes “durable, pieces designed for long lasting use” — the mangled comma is Big W’s — with no material named for any of the five pieces.
Where Big W does make a claim, it is inconsistent. The Masterclass ceramic frypan claims a bare, unsubstantiated “PFAS-Free”. The Masterclass ceramic saucepan — same line, same colourway, same stated construction — claims nothing at all. Across its storage range one container says “BPA Free” and another says “No added BPA”, which are not the same claim.
The clearest illustration of the house-brand effect sits on one shelf. A Décor bottle at $5.75 names its plastic — Tritan — in the product title. Big W’s own clear plastic bottle at $5 names nothing, and makes no BPA claim either. Seventy-five cents buys you an answer.
We went looking for a chemicals or restricted-substances policy covering food-contact goods at each group. Here is everything we found.
kmart.com.au/materials/ returns a 404.So: one policy exists, and you cannot read it. That is the state of the Australian market.
Myer and David Jones are not in the table above, for opposite reasons.
Myer publishes no material information on its product pages. We checked fifteen, from a $10 container to a $799 Breville oven, and found no description, specification, material, coating, origin or warranty text on any of them — the content renders client-side and is not in the served page. Myer is a price and discovery source. Every material fact we have about anything Myer sells came from the brand.
David Jones we could not read at all: every product page returns a bot challenge rather than content. So we scored the brands it carries from the makers’ own documentation and said so on each card.
The premium end produced the most surprising finding of the lot. Not one premium enamelled-cast-iron or glazed-ceramic maker sold in Australia publishes lead or cadmium leach test results — not Le Creuset, not Staub, not Falcon. Zwilling’s cookware FAQ will tell you the silicon, manganese, phosphorus and sulphur content of the cast iron you never eat off, and says of the layer that touches your food only: “The inner coating is matte black enamel.”
Three rules that survive everything above.
A named material beats a good claim. “304 stainless” and “borosilicate glass” are facts you can check. “PFAS-free”, “non-toxic” and “BPA-safe” are assertions, and in this market not one of them is backed by a named laboratory.
A PFOA-free claim tells you nothing. PFOA has been restricted worldwide since 2020. No compliant manufacturer could legally be using it. Every Anko frypan carries the claim; it excludes a substance that was never going to be there and says nothing about PTFE.
Check which part the claim is about. “Ceramic” attached to a crisper plate is not a claim about the basket. “Stainless steel” in a spec table is usually the outside of the box. “BPA-free stainless steel” is a claim about the one component that could never have contained BPA.
Every Australian product we have scored, with the exact wording each retailer uses and what it leaves out, is in the Australian edition — cookware, air fryers, food storage, bottles and lunchboxes. The rubric is here.
The retailer and brand listings quoted above, as they read when we checked them.
New scores, brands that finally answered, and any rule change that affects what you can buy. The list is not open yet — email us and we will add you when it is.