Much attention has been given to PFOA/PTFE non-stick cookware coatings over the past few years, and now Whitford has added non-PFOA versions of its top five brands: Excalibur, Halo, Eclipse, QuanTanium and Quantum 2.
Already, PTFE dispersion suppliers, which manufacture the non-stick coatings in a process that uses PFOA, are committed to eliminating PFOA out of the process by 2015. One of Whitford’s suppliers was ahead of the others in the process, said John Badner, worldwide business manager, and so Whitford went to it to make the new non-PFOA versions of its brands.
And there’s no sacrifice in quality, Badner added. “The non-stick performance in the non-PFOA version is the same as the traditional non-stick,” he said. However, there is a price difference, as it costs about 20 to 25 percent more to manufacture coatings with the new process, he added. But once more dispersion suppliers produce non-PFOA coatings, the costs should come down, he said.
The five brands that now have non-PFOA versions can be used for the full range of cookware, from opening price point to gourmet, he said. And within each brand are different applications, he said. The bakeware version of Eclipse, for example, is not the same as the cookware and electronics version of it because “bakeware doesn’t take nearly as much abuse as cookware and electronics do,” he said. —Andrea Lillo