Looks perfect doesn’t it? And so it should we have taken great care of it and yet it is no longer non stick and it’s all my fault!

Well it seemed like a good idea at the time even though 80€ is a lot of money to pay for a frying pan. It’s my own fault I suppose. I just didn’t read between the lines. I was so enraptured by the idea of a pan without Teflon but still non stick that I didn’t do my homework. It’s always there on a company’s website if you look. You see Greenpan make no claim for how long the pan will remain non stick. They offer a life time guarantee due to manufacturing defaults but there’s no mention about how long the non stick coating is supposed to remain non stick. I just assumed it would be for years.

The pan itself is appears beautifully made. It is a thing of beauty and at first it worked perfectly using less oil and less heat to cook stuff and being amazingly non stick. But over time it has got steadily worse which means using more oil and more heat which probably has a negative effect on the coating. Well after just 5 months it was not non stick at all. frankly it was awful. It used to do pancakes beautifully but not any more. It used to be really easy to clean but not any more.

Obviously  I wrote to Greenpan who quickly blamed it on user error, overheating of the pan which caused carbonising. I might have known it would be my fault! I followed their instructions on how to remove this and regain the pan’s non stick properties. It made no difference. If anything it got worse. I tried pancakes again, always a good test of a non stick pan and they stuck so bad I had to throw them away and put the pan on to soak. Instead I made the pancakes on an old alloy camping pan and they didn’t stick at all!

Now Greenpan want nothing to do with me. It is my fault. I have damaged the pan and carbonised it. But if the problem is carbonisation then why didn’t a good clean according to their instructions work? The surface looks perfect. It looks like new which is not surprising as we have taken great care of it, well one tends to do that when one pays so much for an object.

Well Greenpan can say what they like. I know we have taken extremely good care of this pan and have followed all the advice from the first time we used it and yet just 5 months down the line it is no longer non stick which reduces its usefulness as a cooking implement massively and sadly we have had to return to our old Tefal pans which although not very nice are actually still non stick despite having a hard life for the last 7 years at least. They were not expensive and as a consequence have not be cared for anywhere near as well as our beloved Greenpan.

The joke is that I invested in a Greenpan because I wanted to reduce my impact on the environment. I believed I was buying a quality product that would last decades if taken care of but actually I find that after just a few short months it’s as good as useless (although it still looks lovely) which rather makes a mockery of the pan’s green credentials.

So the conclusion is that perhaps this ceramic coating isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If it really is as tough as they claim why is it no longer non stick now? You can apparently use metal implements in it it’s so tough. We have never done this only using silicone or wood so I fail to understand why it is no longer non stick.

All in all a very disappointing experience with the pan and the company who sell them as they have automatically blamed me for the pan not being non stick even though they have not inspected it. Well I for one won’t be buying another Green pan because if you have to replace them every six months they are not very green are they? I fail to see how we could have looked after it any better than we have and even if it had been overheated a few times should that really render a pan useless? It seems to me that this wonder coating of theirs isn’t as wonderful as they make out.

And just in case you think perhaps I am being a bit harsh or my experience is unusual, I would direct you to Trust Pilot where Greenpan currently have a lamentably low rating of just 1.3 out of five and bear in mind you cannot rate a product less than one star so it’s actually even more pitiful than it at first appears! I don’t suppose Greenpan will be in business for very long. https://fr.trustpilot.com/review/www.greenpan.com