Original research
We read the pages for 56 air fryers sold in the US and Australia. 35 of them either name no material at all or admit a coating exists and never say what it is. PTFE gets named almost only where a law compels it — and “ceramic” is never defined as a chemistry by anybody, because nothing compels that one.
Your air fryer has a basket. The basket is coated, because otherwise the food would weld to it. That coating is the hottest food-contact surface in your kitchen — hotter than a pan, for longer, with air blasting across it.
So: what is it made of?
We went and looked at 56 air fryers sold in the United States and Australia, and read every product page, spec table, manual and support article we could find. Here is the answer, and it is not a chemistry.
The average materials score across all 56 is 23.2 out of 100. That is the worst of the five categories we score, and it is not close — bottles averages 61.0. An air fryer is the appliance most likely to be bought for health reasons and the one least likely to tell you what it is made of.
We have no laboratory and we run no tests. This page is a reading of what manufacturers and retailers publish about their own products, and the central finding is about what they do not publish. A coating nobody will name is not automatically dangerous. It is simply unknowable, and you paid for it.
This is the finding we did not expect, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.
Of the 7 air fryers that name a fluoropolymer, most do it in a California AB 1200 filing or a Colorado disclosure — documents that exist because a statute compels them, published on a separate domain from the product page. Defend Our Health indexes them and they are routinely more candid than anything the same brand says in its own marketing.
Now compare the word “ceramic”. It appears constantly across this category. It is never once defined as a chemistry — no sol-gel system, no silica content, no binder, by any brand, in either country. Why? Because no statute compels it. PTFE has a disclosure law pointed at it. Ceramic does not, so nobody says a word.
In Australian mass retail we found exactly two places where the food-contact coating is named as a chemistry at the point of sale, and neither is the manufacturer doing it voluntarily.
Kogan’s 10L Dual Zone air fryer carries a spec row reading “Divider & Plates: Iron-coated PTFE”. The phrasing is garbled — read literally it says the PTFE is coated in iron, which is backwards — but the meaning is plain, and the marketing copy on the same page says only “Non-stick removable pot”. The spec table tells you; the sales copy does not.
Betta’s listing for the Tefal Easy Fry & Pizza has a structured specification field that reads “Removable pan PTFE”. Tefal’s own marketing for that product says “non-stick”. So the retailer discloses more than the manufacturer — the exact reverse of the usual pattern, and it happens because Betta’s product feed has a field for coating material and somebody filled it in.
Tefal, to be fair, is not hiding anything. Its cookware commitments page argues at length that “PTFE is an inert substance with no effect on health, even in the case of ingestion”, and notes it is used to coat pacemakers. The company uses PTFE and defends it. It just does not put that on the product page, where its standard claim is “0% PFOA, 0% lead, 0% cadmium” — three noughts, none of them the compound actually in the pan.
Watch for this one, because it is everywhere and it is easy to miss.
Ninja’s AF300 Dual Zone, Australia’s best-selling dual-basket air fryer, is listed with “2 x Non-stick ceramic coated Crisper Plates”. Read it again. The word “ceramic” is attached to the two flat plates. The drawers — the actual baskets, the larger surface, the part everything sits in and the fat pools in — are described only as “non-stick”, with no chemistry.
Russell Hobbs does the same thing with its 5.5L Satisfry: the spec sheet has a row reading “Ceramic crisping plate: Yes”, and no row at all for the basket.
A claim about the small insert reads, at a glance, as a claim about the appliance. It is not one. We score the basket, because that is what the food sits in.
The second trap. A spec table says “Material: Stainless Steel” and you reasonably conclude something about the basket. Check the context.
Kogan’s 10L XXL lists “Material Polypropylene & Stainless Steel 304”. A named alloy, precisely specified — describing the exterior, as the surrounding copy makes clear: “Premium stainless steel design. Durable stainless steel complements any kitchen.” The basket is never described at all. Westinghouse’s 25L oven does it with “durable black painted steel”, which is the housing. And Breville’s $769 Smart Oven Air Fryer XL gives its entire construction as “Stainless steel and Plastic”, while shipping a “30cm non-stick pizza pan” whose coating is unnamed, an air fry basket with no material at all, and — per the sibling model’s own manual — an oven cavity that is itself coated: “The walls on the inside of the oven feature a non-stick coating for easy cleaning.”
That same manual then says “To extend the life of your accessories, we do not recommend that these be placed in the dishwasher” — an acknowledgement that the coatings degrade, attached to coatings that are never identified.
The glass air fryer exists because people want to get away from coatings. It is the single most promising development in this category, and it comes with a catch.
The Australian consumer organisation CHOICE bought the Kmart glass air fryer and opened the box. They report it ships with “a non-stick tray insert”, and note that “the images on Kmart’s website show what appears to be a steel mesh tray”. Their recommendation, for anyone buying one of these to avoid coatings: buy a stainless replacement tray for $10–$30.
The Kmart listing does not mention the tray at all — not its existence, not its material. The competing Healthy Choice glass fryer ships a stainless crisping tray and says so.
The pattern is not confined to Kmart. Ninja’s Crispi range is marketed on “non-toxic cooking and storage” and ships two crisper plates whose material and coating do not appear on either the Australian or the American listing. If you are buying glass to avoid a coating, look for what sits inside the glass.
Philips is the biggest name in this category. Neither its retailers nor its own Australian product pages name the basket coating — the JB Hi-Fi listing for the 7.2L XXL does not contain the words “non-stick”.
Philips does maintain a support article. It is titled, exactly, “What materials and coatings are used in my Philips Airfryer?” We tried the US, Indian and UAE versions. Each one renders the heading and the sentence “To find out what materials we use for the parts that come in contact with the food in the Philips Airfryer, please read the article below”. The article below never appears. No Philips product page links to it either.
The clearest demonstration that these claims are marketing rather than specification comes from Walmart. The Beautiful 6-quart air fryer sells at $69 in several colours. Same machine, same price, three listings:
Those are three materially different statements about one object, and the only variable a shopper can see is the colour.
It matters which one you read, too. Walmart’s own published PFAS policy defines PFAS as “including PFOS, PFOA and PTFE”. By Walmart’s own definition, a “PFOA/PFOS-free” coating can still be PFAS. Only the Lavender listing excludes PTFE.
That policy also permits cookware containing intentionally added PFAS to be sold “if disclosed on the product label” — and it is scoped to Marketplace sellers. Walmart’s own house brands are first-party, so it does not reach them.
Every phrase you will see on an air fryer box, ordered by how much it actually excludes:
Three things, in order of how much they matter.
Look for a basket you can identify. Bare stainless mesh, or glass with a stainless crisping tray, is the only configuration where the question is closed. Everything else is a coating, and most coatings are anonymous. Our highest-scoring air fryer, the Fritaire Glass Air Fryer 5qt at 81/100, gets there by having glass you can see through and naming what it is.
Treat “ceramic” as a colour, not a chemistry. It may well be a perfectly reasonable sol-gel coating. It may be marketing over a fluoropolymer. Nobody publishes enough for you to tell, and the brands that make the loudest ceramic claims publish the least evidence.
If the coating is flaking, replace the basket, not the appliance. A damaged coating of unknown composition shedding into food is the one scenario worth acting on, and a generic stainless basket or tray costs a fraction of a new machine.
Every air fryer we have scored, with what each one says and what it leaves out, is on our air fryers page for the US and the Australian edition. The scoring rubric is here.
New scores, brands that finally answered, and any rule change that affects what you can buy. The list is not open yet — email us and we will add you when it is.