168 products checked · sourced to the maker’s own documents
We work out what everything your food touches is actually made of — the steel grade, the glass chemistry, what the coating really is — and score it out of 100.
Here is the short version, and it is shorter than you would like: no Australian law requires a cookware maker to tell you what anything is made of.
There is no equivalent of California’s disclosure rule and no equivalent of the state sales bans. The FSANZ Food Standards Code has no standard listing which materials or coatings cookware may be made from. The Code sets contamination ceilings, not disclosure floors, and FSANZ’s own supporting document states that “the responsibility rests with manufacturers and retailers to ensure that their products are safe”. There is no pre-market check.
What Australia has actually banned: from 1 July 2025, under Schedule 7 of the IChEMS register, the manufacture, import, export and use of three specific PFAS — PFOA, PFOS and PFHxS — whether alone, in mixtures or in articles. Read that scope carefully. It names three substances. It does not ban PTFE, and it creates no labelling duty of any kind.
Several Australian brands now market against that ban in a way that implies more than it says. A pan that never contained PFOA is not made safer by PFOA being banned.
Separately, the NHMRC updated the drinking water guideline values on 26 June 2025: PFOS 8 ng/L, PFOA 200 ng/L, PFHxS 30 ng/L, PFBS 1000 ng/L. That is a water standard, not a cookware one.
Recalls go through the ACCC at productsafety.gov.au, which covers fire, burns and injury — not chemical composition.
The score out of 100 measures what it’s made from, not how safe it is — green means bare, inert materials with nothing applied to them, red means the food meets a coating or a plastic, or nobody will say what it meets. Here is the rubric.
304 stainless steel · tri-ply encapsulated base · stainless riveted handles · tempered glass lids
Names the alloy — “Durable 304 stainless steel” — and there is no coating, so there is nothing applied that can come off. Handles are riveted stainless, lids are tempered glass. No plastic anywhere in the set.
18/8 stainless steel throughout — including the lid. No plastic touches food.
“100% stainless steel interior, including the lid. No plastic touches your food.” That sentence answers the question the entire rest of this category leaves open.
18/8 stainless · platinum-cure silicone lid meeting EU LFGB · the lid IS the seal
The only food storage container in this table that names its silicone cure type and cites a standard: “platinum-grade, food-grade silicone that pass strict EU LFGB standards”.
18/8 electropolished stainless · PP #5 and LDPE #4 lids · Tritan Renew #7 straw · silicone seal
The only bottle we have found, in any market, that names every single part with a resin identification code.
“Bowl Material: Borosilicate glass” · “Coating: Silicone coating”, location not stated
Names the bowl as borosilicate glass, which is the best food-contact answer in Kogan’s whole air fryer range and one of the better ones in Australian retail.
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Most of what gets sold as a non-toxic kitchen is not worth the money. This is the short list, ranked by how much contact the item actually has with hot food.
It touches hot food more than anything else you own. If you change one thing, change this — and the $115 cast-iron skillet scores as well as the $290 one.
Heat plus plastic is the combination that actually has evidence behind it. Glass removes the question, and it is the cheapest swap on this list.
Four hours in a warm bag, five days a week, for years. Stainless takes the whole question off the table.
The lead question in steel bottles is about a sealing dot at the base of vacuum-insulated ones. A single-wall bottle does not have one.
The cheapest swap on the list and the one that pays for itself fastest. We have not scored these yet — it is next.
Every claim linked to the study, statute or manufacturer document behind it — including, twice below, a widely repeated finding that got weaker when we checked it.
A PTFE flake is both at once, by definition. But no study has ever measured particles and fluorinated chemicals coming off the same pan — and the best one that looked found no chemical migration.
The “spoonful of plastic” study now has duplicated images, a formal rebuttal in the same journal, and a specialist arguing the method mistakes brain fat for polyethylene.
We went looking for the number and it does not exist. What does exist points somewhere else entirely.
It is not a certification. No agency issues it, and no law defines it. Here are the two real standards behind the phrase.
Some banned the sale outright. Others only require a label. Most roundups blur the two, and several still have Vermont’s date wrong.
No lab, no kitchen trials, no “we used it for a month”. We read declarations, published lab certificates, statutes and peer-reviewed papers — and we link every one so you can check us.
MontiiCo will not name the steel grade in a $46 lunchbox. Pyrex will not tell you what its Australian glass is. That is not a gap in our research — it is the most useful thing we learned, and we score it.
b.box uses the phrase “food grade silicone”, which no agency issues and no law defines, so we docked it. Cheeki says “BPA free” about steel, which was never plausible, so we docked that too — even though we like both products.
New scores, brands that finally answered a question, and any rule change that affects what you are allowed to buy. Nothing else, and no “wellness” anything. The list is not open yet — email us and we will add you when it is.
