Our Place cookware is largely non-toxic by modern standards. The brand’s ceramic nonstick coating, called Thermakind, is made without PFAS (the “forever chemicals” found in traditional nonstick pans), PTFE (the base material in Teflon), lead, and cadmium. The coating itself is composed mainly of a sand derivative, water, and alcohol. But the full picture is more nuanced than the marketing suggests, and independent testing has raised some questions worth understanding.
What the Coating Is Made Of
Our Place uses a sol-gel ceramic coating, which is a fundamentally different approach from traditional nonstick cookware. Instead of fluoropolymers like PTFE, the coating forms a thin, glass-like film from silicon-based compounds. Think of it as a very fine layer of something closer to glass than plastic. This type of coating doesn’t release toxic fumes when overheated the way PTFE-based pans can, and it doesn’t contain the family of persistent chemicals known as PFAS that have been linked to health problems including cancer, thyroid disease, and immune suppression.
The absence of PFAS is the biggest safety advantage. PFOA, one of the most well-studied PFAS chemicals, has been clearly linked to health risks and was once common in nonstick coatings. A 2025 Consumer Reports survey found that 65 percent of U.S. adults are at least somewhat concerned about PFAS, PFOA, or PTFE in their cookware. Our Place sidesteps that entire chemical family.
What Independent Testing Found
The picture gets more complicated when you look beyond the company’s own claims. Tamara Rubin, an independent lead safety advocate who uses the same XRF testing equipment as the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, tested the original Always Pan and detected lead at 34 parts per million on the inner cooking surface. The colored exterior of the lid tested at 70 ppm. These levels are below the 90 ppm threshold that the CPSC uses for children’s products, but they’re not zero, which conflicts with the brand’s “made without lead” messaging.
Trace levels of cadmium were also detected but were too low to confirm definitively with the instrument used. Chromium, titanium, cobalt, and over a dozen other metals were identified in various components of the pan. It’s worth noting that XRF testing detects the total presence of elements in a material, which is different from measuring how much of those elements actually leach into food during cooking. A metal being present in the coating structure doesn’t automatically mean it transfers to your meal. Still, the gap between “made without lead” and “contains detectable lead” is a legitimate concern for consumers who take those claims at face value.
How It Compares to Traditional Nonstick
If your main worry is PFAS exposure, Our Place is a meaningful improvement over conventional nonstick pans. PTFE-coated cookware can release toxic fumes at temperatures above roughly 500°F, and some pans marketed as “PFOA-free” have been found by Consumer Reports to still contain PFOA. Ceramic coatings avoid this entire category of risk.
The tradeoff is durability. Research published in 2025 comparing sol-gel ceramic coatings to PTFE found that traditional nonstick maintained consistent food-release performance after 90 cooking cycles, with peel force values up to three times lower than the best ceramic coatings tested. In plain terms, PTFE stays slippery longer. The better-performing ceramic coatings in the study held up reasonably well through 30 to 60 cooking cycles before their nonstick properties started declining. Some showed strong resistance to scratching from utensils and maintained their structure even at thinner applications, but none matched PTFE’s longevity under extreme conditions.
This matters for safety in a practical way: as a ceramic coating wears down, the underlying aluminum pan body becomes more exposed to food. While the FDA hasn’t flagged mainstream domestic aluminum cookware as a lead risk, the agency did issue a 2025 warning about certain imported aluminum and aluminum-alloy cookware leaching lead into food. Our Place pans are manufactured in China, so the quality of the base aluminum matters.
What Happens When the Coating Scratches
Our Place states that their ceramic coating remains safe even when scratched, since the coating material itself doesn’t contain the toxic compounds found in fluoropolymer coatings. A scratch reduces nonstick performance but shouldn’t introduce new chemical risks the way a damaged PTFE pan might. If you swallow a small flake of ceramic coating, it’s essentially inert material passing through your digestive system.
To extend the life of the coating, the company recommends using pan protectors when stacking cookware, avoiding metal utensils, and hand-washing rather than using a dishwasher. These aren’t just performance tips. They’re the difference between a pan that works well for a year or two and one that loses its nonstick properties in a few months, eventually leaving you cooking on bare aluminum.
The Bottom Line on Safety
Our Place cookware eliminates the most significant chemical concern in modern nonstick pans: PFAS and PTFE exposure. On that front, it delivers what it promises. The ceramic coating is made from relatively simple, inorganic materials and doesn’t carry the same overheating risks as Teflon-style coatings.
Where the “non-toxic” label deserves some skepticism is in the trace metals department. Independent XRF testing detected low levels of lead on the cooking surface of the Always Pan, which doesn’t necessarily mean lead is leaching into food but does mean the “made without lead” claim isn’t perfectly clean. If you’re specifically trying to minimize lead exposure (for a young child’s food preparation, for instance), that’s a data point worth weighing. For most adults choosing between an Our Place pan and a conventional PTFE-coated option, the ceramic version represents a lower overall chemical risk profile, with the understanding that no cookware is perfectly inert and “non-toxic” is more of a spectrum than a binary.