Solidteknics was founded in 2014 by mechanical engineer and keen cook, Mark J. Henry. Tired of disposable, synthetic-coated pans piling up in our landfills, Mark envisioned a whole new era in cookware—one that was better for our health and planet. It took two decades of R&D to launch the first of Solidteknics’ many world-first kitchenware innovations—a seamless one-piece pan wrought from a single sheet of iron. Cookware free from toxins, heavy metals, and synthetic coatings and durable enough to last centuries.
Solidteknics’ range of healthy, sustainable and multi-generational kitchen tools are in thousands of professional kitchens and happy homes worldwide.
At Solidteknics, we are at the forefront of innovation and aren't afraid to say we are the world leaders in healthy, durable cookware! Some might say that is a bold claim from a small Australian cookware manufacturer, but only if they don’t know us and the background behind our world-leading innovations.
What makes Solidteknics different from other cookware brands?
Solidteknics is run by mechanical engineers, not importers or marketers. The team hold three decades of experience in chef product design a over 12 years of hands-on \ production, manufacturing patented world-first innovations in Australia and exporting them worldwide (rather than importing and rebranding cookware made elsewhere, as most cookware companies do).
Is Solidteknics a big cookware brand?
After 12+ years of rapidly growing support from top chefs and gourmet home cooks, Solidteknics is a big cookware brand in Australia. We export to the USA, UK, Japan, and South Korea. Although we are small players in those countries, we are about to become well known in the USA with much more promotion to spread the good news about our unbeatable dominance in healthy and durable cookware technology. More significantly, we are the best in the world at making products that perfectly fit with a major new societal shift away from toxic, disposable cookware and toward healthy cookware (and all things healthy and sustainable). We are well ahead of that curve, with our patented cookware already widely loved by the leading edge of the public in this societal trend.
What Patents does Solidteknics hold?
If our seamless wrought one-piece pans look simple, we can assure you they aren’t simple to manufacture! We hold strong patents for our world-first manufacturing methods and even more trade secrets, ensuring our pans would be very difficult to copy. That’s why we’re still the only manufacturer of our new category of wrought seamless cookware. Yes, other manufacturers have made basic one-piece steel pans or beautiful, expensive, artisanal hand-forged wrought iron pans (the way they have been made for 3,500 years, since the dawn of the Iron Age), but none have the same methods of manufacture. We hold the patents for a reason, and none have our combination of superior conductive materials, quality of finish, and long, comfortable vented handles that stay cool. We also patented a whole new way to season iron that heavily reduces pollution by instantly dropping a very hot pan into a vat of the right oil: Quenched and ready to cook right out of the bag!
View the Design Museum - our entire history of SOLID innovations!
Is nöni™ the world's only solid stainless steel cookware?
Yes. We are the first, and still the only, manufacturer of solid one-piece stainless steel cookware. It has never been done before because nobody thought it was possible.
We made it possible with our launch of nöni™ seamless one-piece stainless cookware, a high-performance game-changer with more conductivity and centuries more durability than any clad stainless cookware with rivets/welds/screws for handle joins. All other brands of stainless steel cookware have joined handles that may last decades but not centuries. Yes, we hold the patents for this method of manufacturing, but why was our little engineering company the first? Simply because the ‘experts’ have always said (like they’ve been saying to us all throughout our careers in engineering) that you can’t make solid stainless steel cookware because stainless steel doesn’t conduct heat. It’s almost an insulator relative to ‘good’ cookware materials. That is true of nickel stainless steels or cheap ferritic stainless steels.
Our particular ferritic non-nickel stainless steel is made for us in Finland (because no stainless steel is made in Australia). Our stainless steel is completely different from the nickel stainless steel that most other manufacturers use. They use it because it is easier to press and easier to polish into a shiny consumer appearance. The problem is that it conducts so poorly that they need to add layers of aluminium or copper to try to conduct the heat source enough for it to push through the final layer of insulating nickel stainless to cook your food. Our non-nickel stainless steel is so conductive that it doesn’t need any other materials to conduct your heat source very efficiently when cooking your food. Our customers know this because they all say, ‘Turn your burners down half’!
How durable is Solidteknics cookware?
As far as we know, we have the world’s longest warranty: multi-century! Our cookware is almost* indestructible because it is made from one seamless, solid piece of malleable wrought iron or ferritic stainless steel.
Because Solidteknics cookware is wrought from one piece of a material that will never crack, the only way to destroy our cookware is to physically wear through it. That’s obvious to any mechanical engineer. It’s also obvious that it will take more than a century, and potentially many centuries or millennia … so your descendants will be cooking on your Solidteknics pans you invested in and used your whole life for many generations to come. That’s free, healthy, sustainable cookware as a gift for future generations instead of the old cycle of disposable cookware.
But isn’t cast iron also one piece of iron?
Yes! Cast iron seems strong because it is cast in one heavy piece, but cast iron cookware regularly cracks because it is ‘crystalline’, not wrought to make iron ductile (the origin of the term ‘wrought iron’ just means iron that has been worked into shape, and that work squashes the iron crystals into overlapping platelets, so cracks can’t propagate through the grain boundaries the way they easily do along crystal boundaries). Have you ever wondered why there aren’t many cast iron cooking vessels in museums around the world, and the ones you see are usually cracked?
At the same time, there are many wrought iron pans that are still in perfectly useable condition after 2,000+ years. Our AUS-ION™ wrought iron cookware is also half the weight of cast iron.
.jpg)
Why should synthetic non-stick cookware be avoided?
Our cookware isn’t just sustainable because it costs close to zero per year over the long run of many generations, but it is regenerating a highly destructive industry that has been dominated for two generations by toxic and disposable synthetic nonstick cookware. Synthetic nonstick pans have been proven toxic to manufacture, toxic to heat, and toxic to dispose of.
Every year, Australians throw more than 1.2 million nonstick pans in our landfills. They are all imported because we are the only real production manufacturer of cookware in Australia, and we would never use their toxic coatings. Don’t be fooled by greenwashing of synthetic nonsticks by marketeers who claim the new plastic coatings are safer than the old versions. It is only a matter of time before their polymer chains are proven at least as toxic, just as it took decades of health problems from the old polymer coatings to be proven toxic. That’s an industry we don’t want to sustain!
Instead, for our healthy, non-toxic nonstick, we modernised the ancient art of seasoned iron by patenting our ‘Quenched’ seasoning method, which we use to pre-season all our AUS-ION wrought iron cookware with non-GMO rice bran oil, so you can get cooking ‘right out of the bag’, and build your own forever-renewable non-toxic nonstick simply by cooking with fats/oils and some simple cleaning maintenance. Far less harmful to people and the planet than synthetic nonsticks, and far less wasteful and damaging than the new buzz in nonstick: ceramic coatings.
But aren’t ceramic nonstick coatings non-toxic?
Yes, good quality ceramic coatings from the top manufacturers won’t be toxic (avoid unknown brands and their heavy metal contaminants), but they are rapidly disposable. Most only last a year (or less), and then they go into the landfill along with their aluminium cores and often plastic handles. Why would you still do that when you know there’s a multi-century-durable, non-toxic, natural nonstick pan made in Australia from clean Australian iron that also costs a lot less over a lifetime than constant purchasing of replacement disposable pans?
This will all be common knowledge in a decade. We, and you, are just ahead of the curve.
Once you know, you know, and there is no excuse and no going back.
