MessyPig

Brand review

Made In cookware review: the one that publishes the build

Five plies, named alloys, a thickness in millimetres. Almost nobody else in this category tells you that much, and it is why Made In scores 92/100 on materials without publishing a single lab certificate.

Most cookware reviews tell you how a pan sears a steak. This one does not, because we have not cooked on it and are not going to pretend otherwise. What we did was read everything Made In publishes about what the pan is made of, and compare it with what the marketing says.

On that measure Made In does better than any coated pan we have looked at, and it does it the boring way: by describing the object.

What the score is, before you read one

It is a disclosure score out of 100, not a safety rating: what it is made of, who tested it, where it is made, whether the claim matches the evidence. A pan can score 20 and be perfectly fine to cook in. What a low score means is that nobody outside the company can check. The rubric is here.

What they publish, point by point

Made In Stainless Clad Frying Pan — 92/100 · bare, inert materials

$119.99 (10in, listed from $139)

  • What touches the food — 60/60. 5-ply: 304 18/10 stainless, aluminium, aluminium alloy, 403 ferritic · 2.7mm
  • The rest of it — 21/25. Lids, seals, handles and the outside.
  • Backed up — 11/15. A statutory materials filing, or named standards with a report number — a declaration rather than an independent test.
  • Made in. Italy and the US (not broken down)
  • They claim. Made without "PFAS PFOA PTFE Lead Cadmium BPA"
  • Warranty. Lifetime, defects

Publishes the actual build — five plies, named alloys, a thickness in millimetres. Almost nobody else does. Uncoated stainless, so there is no coating to be evasive about. The best everyday pan on this page, and our pick if you want one thing that will outlast you.

What we’d want you to know:

  • Says it was third-party tested under European food-contact regulations and gives a report number, but does not name the laboratory or publish the report.
  • “Made in Italy and the US” is not broken down by component.
  • A 2023 class action over “PFOA free” and “100% non-toxic” claims concerned Made In’s non-stick line, not this pan. The plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed it with prejudice in April 2025 — there was no ruling on the merits, and the fullest public account of it is Made In’s own blog post.

The full entry, with every source · The maker’s own page

Our verdict

The best everyday pan on our table, and the one we would buy. Not because it is the safest — we have no way to rank safety — but because uncoated stainless removes the entire question that the rest of this category is built on. There is no coating whose recipe can be a trade secret, so there is nothing for a brand to be evasive about.

The gap in the file is testing: Made In asserts what the pan is made of but does not publish a lab report. For bare stainless that matters less than it would for a coating, because the composition claim is checkable against the alloy spec. It still costs them two points, and it should.

If the price is the objection, the $25 Lodge skillet scores 78 and the reasoning is much the same.

Related

Sources

  1. Made In Stainless Clad Frying Pan, 10 inch. madeincookware.com
  2. Made In’s own account of the 2023 lawsuit. madeincookware.com
  3. Complaint coverage, Elseroad v. Boston Foundry (W.D. Tex.). www.classaction.org
  4. MessyPig materials rubric. How we score

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