HexClad Hybrid 14-Piece Cookware Set Review: The Honest Take After The 2025 Lawsuit

What's in the box

The 14-piece set includes 8", 10", and 12" frying pans with lids, 2-quart, 3-quart, and 8-quart pots with lids, and two silicone trivets. Lids are tempered glass with steel rims. Handles are stainless and designed to stay cooler than fully-clad equivalents. Everything is induction-compatible and oven-safe to 900°F (steel components) or 400°F (anything with the tempered glass lid).

That covers what most home kitchens need: small egg pan, weeknight skillet, sear pan, sauce pot, everyday pot, and a stockpot for soup and pasta. The omission is a sauté pan with high straight sides — if you braise often, you'll want to add the deep sauté separately.

How the hybrid surface actually works

The cooking surface is the whole pitch. HexClad uses a tri-ply body (stainless–aluminum–stainless), then laser-etches a hexagonal pattern of raised stainless ridges, and fills the recessed valleys with a ceramic-blend nonstick coating. The idea: food touches the stainless peaks (so it browns and you can use metal utensils on the high points), while the coated valleys release sauces and starches.

In practice that means the pan behaves like neither pure stainless nor pure nonstick. You can get a sear on a steak — better than a typical PTFE pan, not as good as bare stainless or cast iron — and eggs slide if the pan is properly preheated and lightly oiled. It is genuinely a hybrid, with the trade-offs that word usually hides.

Performance and real-world cooking

Heat distribution is even and quick across the bottom. Induction performance is strong; the pans react fast and hold temperature steadily. The 12-inch skillet is the workhorse of the set and handles everything from morning eggs to a Sunday steak with the same hardware.

The stay-cool handles are a noticeable upgrade over fully-clad sets. They warm up under sustained high heat but stay manageable for most stovetop cooking — you still want a glove for oven transfers above 400°F.

The catch: nonstick performance depends on preheating discipline. Drop a cold egg into a cold HexClad pan and it sticks just like cheap stainless would. Preheat, add a thin film of fat, and it releases cleanly. Most negative reviews come from cooks who used the pan like a Teflon skillet and discovered it doesn't behave like one when cold.

Searing performance is the genuine surprise. Because the raised stainless ridges contact the food, you do get fond development and a real crust. It is not as aggressive as bare carbon steel, but it is meaningfully more capable than any pure nonstick.

Long-term durability — what 2 years of testing shows

Multiple independent long-term reviews (Tom's Guide, She Knows, The Kitchn, Prudent Reviews) have now run HexClad pans through 14 to 36 months of daily use. The pattern that emerges:

• Most testers report the pans hold up well past the two-year mark, with the hex ridges visibly intact and nonstick performance largely preserved with proper care.
• A minority of buyers report nonstick wear in the valleys between hex ridges as early as 8 months, with food beginning to stick in spots.
• The dishwasher is technically allowed but is the most-cited cause of premature dulling and surface etching. Hand-washing extends the surface life noticeably.
• The hex ridges themselves are extremely durable — that part of the marketing largely holds.

This is more durable than mid-tier nonstick (which typically degrades inside a year) but less reliably durable than fully-clad stainless (which lasts decades). You are paying clad-stainless prices for nonstick-style longevity, which is the central honest critique of the line.

The 2025 lawsuit, plainly

In 2025, HexClad settled a $2.5 million class-action lawsuit over claims that it had marketed its cookware as "non-toxic," "PFOA-free," and "PFAS-free" while the nonstick coating uses PTFE — which is itself a PFAS compound. HexClad denied wrongdoing but agreed, as part of the settlement, to stop using those specific labels on its PTFE-coated products going forward.

What this means in practice: the pans are not more toxic than any other PTFE-coated nonstick pan on the market. PFOA — the more notorious compound — has been phased out of cookware coatings industry-wide for years, including HexClad's. But the broader "PFAS-free" claim was not accurate, and buyers who specifically wanted PFAS-free cookware (which is a defensible preference) should look at fully ceramic-coated lines or unenameled cast iron and carbon steel instead. The lawsuit was about marketing language, not about a sudden health hazard.

If this is a deal-breaker, the set is not for you. If it isn't, the cooking performance discussion above is what actually matters.