How we score

Every number on this site measures one thing: what the product is made from. Sixty of the hundred points are the surface your food actually touches. Here is exactly how it works.

Every score on this site is a materials score, out of 100. It answers one question: what is this thing made from?

Most of the number — 60 of the 100 — is about the surface your food actually touches, because that is the part that matters and the part companies are vaguest about. The rest covers the lids, seals and handles, and whether anyone other than the manufacturer has confirmed what the thing is made of.

Why materials, and why this is not a safety rating

We do not have a laboratory, so we cannot tell you how much of anything migrates into your dinner, and we will not pretend otherwise. But the materials themselves are a knowable fact with known properties, and you can reason about them honestly without a lab. Bare 18/8 stainless has no coating that can degrade. Borosilicate glass has no organic compound in it to leach. PTFE is a fluoropolymer whatever the pan costs. A sol-gel “ceramic” coating is a proprietary recipe nobody outside the company has seen.

So a high score means there is very little here that could come off. A low score means the food meets a coating or a plastic — or that nobody will say what it meets. Neither is a verdict on whether a product is safe to use.

The rubric

What touches your food — 60 points

The single most important fact about a pan, a lunch box or a bottle is what its inside surface is made of. Inert, uncoated materials score highest, and the more specific the maker is, the higher they go.

60 — one inert material, fully specified, with nothing applied to it. A named steel alloy (PlanetBox names 18/8 and 18/0), a named glass chemistry (Anchor Hocking publishes the oxide formula), 100% ceramic through the whole body (Xtrema).
53 — inert and uncoated, but the grade or type is not specified. All-Clad says tri-ply and not which stainless. Hydro Flask says “stainless steel” and stops.
47 — an inert base with a named applied layer, such as Solidteknics seasoning its iron with non-GMO rice bran oil. Also where a maker sells two different chemistries under one brand name and will not say which one you are buying — which is exactly the position Pyrex is in.
42 — an inert base with an applied layer named only by category. Lodge’s “100% natural vegetable oil” is a shelf, not an oil.
34 — a non-fluorinated coating with its chemistry disclosed at family level. GreenPan’s Thermolon is described as a silicon-based sol-gel, which is a real answer even though the recipe is not.
26 — a non-fluorinated coating whose recipe is withheld entirely.
22 — the food-contact surface is a named plastic with no grade or standard attached. Polypropylene is polypropylene; which polypropylene is the question.
19 — a coating claimed free of fluorochemicals, contradicted by the company’s own documents.
14 — a fluoropolymer coating, disclosed as such. Philips names tetrafluoroethylene in a statutory filing; Instant names PTFE, PFA and FEP. We would rather a brand say this than hide it, and the score reflects the material, not the honesty.
8 — there is a coating and its chemistry is not stated at all. “Thermakind”. “Non-stick basket”.
0 — no material stated anywhere we could find.

The rest of it — 25 points

Lids, seals, gaskets, handles, the outside of the pan. These matter less than the cooking surface, and they are not nothing — a glass container with an undisclosed plastic lid is not a glass container in practice.

25 — no plastic anywhere, every secondary material named and inert. Bare cast iron with an iron handle. ECOlunchbox, which has no gaskets at all.
21 — secondary parts named, including the standard a silicone actually meets. PlanetBox names LFGB.
17 — silicone or plastic named as a material, with no grade or standard. “Food grade silicone” is not a certification anybody issues.
13 — silicone or plastic present and the type not named.
8 — plastic in direct mouth or food contact with the type not named. A bottle cap you drink through counts.
4 — a documented materials problem on a part that does not touch food.
0 — nothing stated.

Backed up — 15 points

Is the materials claim backed by anything other than the company saying so? This is the smallest part of the score on purpose. It is a confidence adjustment, not the subject.

15 — dated certificates from a named laboratory, published and openable. Xtrema publishes SGS leach tests going back years.
11 — a statutory materials filing, or named standards with a report number. A California AB 1200 disclosure lands here: a real document listing real chemicals, but a manufacturer declaring against a designated list rather than anyone testing anything.
6 — testing or compliance asserted, no lab named, no report published.
0 — nothing.

We changed the whole rubric in September 2026

Until this month the number on each product was a disclosure score: it measured how much a company was willing to put in writing. That was an interesting thing to measure and the wrong thing to put in a big number at the top of a card. Readers came here asking what a pan is made of, and we answered a different question.

So the score is now about the materials. The research did not change — every source, every flag and every quotation on this site is the same as it was, and the disclosure work is still what lets us tell a specified material from an unspecified one. What changed is which question the number answers.

Some products moved a long way. ECOlunchbox went up, because a steel box with no gaskets and no plastic is materially excellent even though the company publishes almost nothing. Caraway and GreenPan came down, because a coating is a coating however well documented it is. That is the rubric working, not a change of mind about any brand.

Why scores are not round numbers

Because the three parts are weighted 60, 25 and 15, and the rungs inside them are set where the material distinctions actually fall rather than at convenient intervals. A score of 78 is 42 plus 25 plus 11, and each of those is a specific finding. We would rather the arithmetic be visible than rounded into something tidier than the evidence.

What we do not do

We do not lab-test. Anyone telling you they scratched a pan in a controlled setting and measured the result should show you the method and the lab. We have neither, so we do not claim it.
We do not score safety. Every number here describes a material, not a risk. We have no way to measure migration into food and we do not estimate it.
We do not cook with them. No “we used this for six months”. Where durability matters we cite long-run owner reports and say that is what they are.
We do not treat an independent tester’s XRF reading as a lab result. XRF measures how much of an element is present in a material. It does not measure how much gets into your food. Both numbers matter, they are different numbers, and we say which one we are quoting.
We do not let commission change the order. As of today we are in no affiliate programme at all, so nothing on this site is a paid link. The rubric was deliberately written now, before any money is involved, so that it cannot be quietly bent later.

When we get it wrong

We will. If a brand publishes something we missed, or a figure here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it and date the correction on the page. If a manufacturer names a material it has been vague about, that is a score change and we will say so in the newsletter.