How we score

Every score on this site is a disclosure score. It answers one question: how much is this manufacturer willing to tell you, and does their “free of” claim match what they can actually back up?

It is not a safety rating. A pan can score 1 out of 10 here and be perfectly fine to cook in. What a low score tells you is that nobody outside the company can check — and that you are being asked to take a marketing claim on trust.

The rubric

Composition — 3 points

Does the maker state what every food-contact part is actually made of? Not a trade name. A material.

• 3 — every food-contact part named, with grade or composition. Anchor Hocking publishes an oxide formula. PlanetBox names both steel grades, including the cheaper one on the lid.
• 2 — most parts named, one significant gap. All-Clad says tri-ply but not which stainless grade.
• 1 — a trade name where a material should be. “Thermakind”. “pure Pyrex® glass”.
• 0 — nothing meaningful published.

Testing — 3 points

Is there third-party testing, with the laboratory named and results you can actually open?

• 3 — named lab, dated certificates, published. Xtrema publishes SGS leach-test certificates going back years. Caraway names Light Labs and links a report.
• 2 — third-party testing referenced against a named standard, but the lab is not identified or the report is not published.
• 1 — conformity asserted against standards with no lab and no report.
• 0 — nothing.

Origin — 2 points

Is the country of manufacture stated? This is the single easiest thing to publish and the one most often left out. A brand that will not name a country is telling you something.

• 2 — stated plainly. “Made in China” scores the same as “Made in the USA”. We are scoring the disclosure, not the country.
• 1 — partial. “Made in Italy and the US” without saying which parts.
• 0 — not stated, or replaced with something that sounds like an answer. “Mindfully manufactured in BSCI-certified factories” is not a country.

Claim precision — 2 points

Does the headline claim match the substantiation? This is where most of the interesting failures are.

• 2 — the claim is exactly as strong as the evidence, or the brand sensibly makes no claim at all. All-Clad does not say its steel pan is non-toxic, because it is a steel pan.
• 1 — a stretch, or an inconsistency across the company’s own pages.
• 0 — the claim outruns the evidence. Either the small print is narrower than the headline — GreenPan’s “PFAS-free” substantiated by “made without intentionally added PFAS” — or a strong claim is made with nothing published behind it at all, as with Our Place and Bentgo.

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 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 answers a question we have flagged as unanswered, that is a score change and we will say so in the newsletter.