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I like cooking and like using good cookware. We have some Farberware mixing bowls that we got as wedding presents. We have a Kitchen Aide mixer that is built like a tank and weighs about as much. We have some Lodge cast iron frying pans and some All-Clad and some Made-In pots and pans as well. But there is nothing to say that a brand we've purchased before and trusted is the same quality now.

worseonpurpose.com - Your cookware got worse on purpose

Six companies, eighty-one brands
Centre Lane Partners, a private equity firm, owns Pyrex, Corelle, CorningWare, Snapware, Visions, Chicago Cutlery, Instant Pot, Anchor Hocking, Lenox, Oneida, and Reed & Barton. That is almost all of the surviving legacy American tabletop industry under one roof, and we'll come back to it, because that story is a doozy.

Groupe SEB, the French conglomerate behind T-fal, bought All-Clad in 2004, WMF in 2016, Lagostina, the Emeril license, and, as of January 2025, de Buyer, the French carbon steel maker everyone recommends as the antidote to enshittification (let’s see what their new owners do with that reputation). SEB announced up to 2,100 job cuts this February, with German outlets reporting three plants on the block.
Meyer, a family-owned manufacturing giant out of Vallejo and Thailand, makes over 120,000 pans a day that almost never say Meyer on them: Farberware cookware, KitchenAid cookware, Rachael Ray, Circulon, Anolon. The KitchenAid pots at Target have the mixer company's name and Meyer's Thai steel.

Newell Brands bought Calphalon in 1998, promised nothing would change. It moved production to China, and closed the last American Calphalon plant outside Toledo at the end of 2023, 130 jobs. Newell is the company that did the same to Mirro in Manitowoc two decades earlier, and this April Manitowoc sued Newell for $6 million to clean up the mess it left.

American Securities, another private equity firm, bought Conair in 2021, and Cuisinart with it. Cuisinart's food processors were already the subject of the largest kitchen appliance recall in CPSC history, 8 million units whose aging blades cracked and shed metal into food, with 69 reports of fragments and 30 injured mouths.

Lifetime Brands owns or rents nearly everything else with a dead founder's name on it: Farberware kitchenware and knives, Mikasa, Pfaltzgraff, the American license for Sabatier. It manufactures almost nothing. Its one growth business in a money-losing 2025 was Dolly Parton housewares, up 150 percent.

The problem with buying from any of the above is the incentive underneath the label. When a brand changes hands this many times, the name becomes the product and the pan becomes a cost to be managed beneath it: thinner steel here, an offshored handle there, a warranty rewritten by lawyers instead of engineers, and so on…

Nobody has run this playbook with more gusto than Centre Lane. Run it all the way out and the ending looks like this: one firm holding most of the surviving legacy American tableware names, a state monopoly case grinding through discovery, and the plant that made Pyrex for 132 years standing empty in western Pennsylvania.

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