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.”

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. “Claiming to be a smaller company is no defense to false advertising—all companies large and small have the same rights and obligations under federal and state false advertising laws,” Zarlenga said in the release.

The lawsuit is the latest attack on anti-PFAS advocacy by two of the largest companies in the global cookware industry. In 2024, as more than two dozen state legislatures weighed bans on consumer products with PFAS in them, Groupe SEB, the parent company of Groupe SEB USA, and Meyer formed the Cookware Sustainability Alliance, an advocacy group for the industry. That group has actively opposed bans, including signing letters and testifying in statehouses.

Last fall, facing a bill in the California legislature to ban consumer products containing PFAS, celebrity chefs, including Rachael Ray, Marcus Samuelsson, and David Chang sent letters to the legislature opposing the bill. (Ray and Chang have cookware lines affiliated with Meyer, while Samuelsson serves as a “chef partner” for All-Clad, which is owned by Groupe SEB. WIRED sought comment from All Clad, Ray, Samuelsson, and Chang. All four did not respond.) The bill ultimately passed the legislature but was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom.

“The Cookware Sustainability Alliance focuses on state-level advocacy to protect perfectly safe cookware from being swept into overly broad PFAS product bans,” the group’s president, Steve Burns, told WIRED in an email. “We are not a party to any lawsuit at this point.”

Last year, the Cookware Sustainability Alliance challenged claims made by Caraway through the National Advertising Division (NAD), an independent nonprofit that is often linked with the Better Business Bureau National Programs that self-polices the ad industry. The alliance challenged some of the claims in Caraway’s advertising around PFAS.

The NAD ruled that Caraway could continue to advertise its products as “nontoxic” and “PFAS-free,” but it should avoid specific claims in its advertising, including that other nonstick cookware “can release toxins into your food and home during ordinary, manufacturer-recommended use.”

Caraway, the February lawsuit alleges, continued to use that messaging despite the NAD decision. The company says that most examples of advertising highlighted in the lawsuit simply state that its products are nontoxic and that it fully complied with the NAD’s recommendations. But the suit also claims that Caraway “has not taken down many of the relevant advertisements.” In a memo to support a dismissal motion, Caraway alleged the NAD did not provide “any factual support whatsoever to the element of consumer deception.”

Products from some lines owned by both Groupe SEB and Meyer—including some Rachael Ray products—are advertised as “PFAS-free” or “toxin-free.” When asked about products sold by both companies that contain claims about PFAS, Zarlenga sent over an example of a Caraway ad from the lawsuit featuring language that he claims goes against the NAD ruling and imagery labeling a generic nonstick pan as “Toxic Cookware.”

“This ad and others like it are a far cry from simply stating that a product is toxin-free,” Zarlenga said. “Under the circumstances, it should be no surprise that producers of traditional nonstick cookware are taking steps to correct misinformation about their products in the courts and in a small number of state legislatures.”

Jordan Nathan, the founder of Caraway, alleges this and some of the ads in the complaint using outdated messaging were displayed as a result of tech glitches and are no longer part of the company’s materials.

“A number of the examples within the complaint are actually in compliance with the NAD,” Nathan claims. “The tricky thing is that we’re allowed to say we’re nontoxic, because we don’t have PFAS. A lot of the ads and content you’ll see today speak toward Caraway itself versus running a comparison.”

“Advertising law will typically allow opinions, what we call puffery, saying ‘my product is the best, my product is better, it's the favorite,’” says Michael Goodyear, an associate professor at New York Law School. However, he says, the law also aims to guard consumers against “statements being made as statements of fact,” especially if any of them are wrong or misleading.

The case is set to proceed to trial. If it does, Goodyear says, the debate over the science could take center stage before a jury.

“Where the rubber really seems to make the road in this case is, has PTFE ever caused any health issues when it’s used as coating for cookware?” he says. “It seems like there's a dispute about that.”

PFAS are a class of thousands of different chemicals that have been used since the 1940s. Their components break down very slowly over time, which they can build up in the environment and the human body. Some of the most commonly used forever chemicals have been linked to a wide variety of health impacts, from cancers to reproductive issues to reduced immune response. Research has shown that around a third of Americans are exposed to forever chemicals in their drinking water, while nearly all US residents have some form of PFAS chemicals in their blood.

After the health implications of some of these chemicals became public in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the industry phased out production of two of the most harmful types of PFAS, including the main chemicals used to make nonstick pans. Nonstick cookware is now largely made with PTFE, a different type of PFAS chemical. Group SEB and Meyer use it, and the lawsuit claims that it “is a fundamentally safe chemical.”

Much of Caraway’s marketing before the NAD decision focused on how Nathan founded the company after getting sick with “Teflon flu,” a commonly used term for a health condition that is the result of breathing in fumes from heated forever chemicals. The Poison Control center reported more than 250 cases of suspected Teflon flu in consumers in 2023.

The lawsuit argues that “under normal conditions,” cookware made with PTFE has “never been proven to pose any health risks or have any measurable risk of contaminating consumers’ food, homes, or bodies.” (PTFE pans have to reach very high temperatures in order to release toxins, a situation that the lawsuit describes as outside of how people normally cook their food.) The FDA has allowed some PFAS to be used for nonstick coating, but, as the NAD decision notes, the agency’s “rationale focuses only on the migration of PFAS to food and does not address the potential toxicity when the fumes are overheated.”

As Groupe SEB and Meyer acknowledge in their complaint, different types of PFAS are still used to manufacture PTFE. This, says Courtney Carignan, an exposure scientist and environmental epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, can increase possible exposure for workers and the chance of the chemicals entering the air and water. (Teflon flu, Carignan says, was documented early on in workers exposed to fumes in factories.) However, Carignan says that for humans, there’s “surprisingly few studies on cookware PFAS emissions, migration to food, and consumer exposure.”