Kitchen utensils are put to the test at OXO’s facility in New York City. Photographer: Dina Litovsky for Bloomberg Businessweek
The first headlines were unambiguous: “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula. It’s probably leaching chemicals into your cooking oil,” wrote the Atlantic in late October 2024. Six weeks later, the New York Times softened the tone in a wellness column: “Do I Really Need to Throw Out My Black Plastic Spatula?” In January 2025, R&D World weighed in with its own take: “Pull those black plastic spatulas out of the trash,” it said, dubbing the recent media hype “black spatulageddon.”
There’s perhaps no US brand with more at stake in this debate than OXO. The beloved maker of no-frills kitchen essentials—which Euromonitor International Ltd. estimates sells about 1 in every 12 US kitchen utensils—is famous for its signature black Good Grips handles, invented in 1990 by a husband trying to make a vegetable peeler with a more ergonomic handle for his wife, for her arthritis. Although the company also sells plenty of wood and silicone items, OXO’s popular coated spoons and tongs became a kind of shorthand for “plastic tools” throughout the latest cookware hullabaloo, which kicked off in the fall when a since-corrected study in the scientific journal Chemosphere showed concerning levels of cancer-causing flame retardants in certain recycled black plastics.
The company and its competitors have firmly maintained that their plastic products are completely safe, but the panic caused some consumers to rethink their use of plastic. Sales of stainless steel kitchen utensils and accessories were up more than 13% year-on-year in the four weeks ended on Jan. 25, while silicone sales soared 70%, compared with an almost 23% decline in cookware made of nylon, a kind of plastic, according to retail data from NIQ. Products made with stainless steel and silicone are “clearly outpacing plastic cookware in growth,” an OXO spokeswoman says.
A wall of OXO’s signature utensils (left); inside OXO’s engineering lab. Photographer: Dina Litovsky for Bloomberg Businessweek
The outsize role of plastics in everyday household products has been garnering increasing attention for years now, with more consumer awareness than ever about PFAS, aka forever chemicals, and microplastics. President Donald Trump’s recently confirmed head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has pledged to “Make America Healthy Again,” in part by reducing chemicals in the food supply chain. The conversation reached a boiling point in late 2024, when the black plastic study had influencers and casual cooks tossing their plastic tongs and spoons en masse.
The eventual revision noted that a math mistake had produced a significant overestimation of people’s exposure, but many consumers won’t know it: The correction wasn’t broadcast nearly as widely as the initial reports. (The lead author maintains that the levels of toxic chemicals in certain black plastic cookware are still concerning even after redoing the calculations.)
This kind of back-and-forth coverage can leave so-called zombie facts floating in the consumer conscious, putting affected companies in an awkward position. Being a consumer in this media environment can be “confusing,” says Lua O’Brien, global category director at OXO. Euromonitor estimates the US kitchen utensil market was worth $4.6 billion last year, so tool manufacturers have a real incentive to try to get it right.
Lua O'Brien, global category director at OXO. Photographer: Dina Litovsky for Bloomberg Businessweek
Even before the latest scare, OXO—today owned by consumer products company Helen of Troy Ltd.—was leaning into more plastic-free options. It rolled out beechwood salad servers in June 2024, PFAS-free ceramic-coated bakeware in November and a steel griddle turner in December, all of which were in the works well before the controversy. A particularly intricate product can take about two years to develop and release, OXO says. The brand is also exploring using different woods, including acacia and walnut, for utensils, along with more glass items. The plastic-free alternatives don’t come cheap: OXO’s glass salad spinner is $65; the plastic version goes for less than half of that. “People will pay for nonplastic,” O’Brien says.
An OXO glass salad spinner (left); a spatula undergoes testing in the lab. Photographer: Dina Litovsky for Bloomberg Businessweek
And prices could go higher still, thanks to Trump’s latest tariffs. Most of OXO’s products are made in China, where the US recently imposed a 10% levy on all goods, though the company was working to dual-source more products even before the new taxes. Lifetime Brands Inc., which designs and markets tools for KitchenAid, Farberware and other brands, has been paying to hold “substantially” more inventory in the US to help offset the increased tariffs while the company shifts manufacturing out of China, says Steve Campise, the company’s president of kitchenware. At Lifetime, where he says “plastic tools continue to be a significant share of the tool business,” diversifying the supply chain is a key target in 2025: According to Campise, 75% of production will be outside of China before the end of this year.
Meanwhile, consumers are just trying to keep up. Becca Tetzlaff, a 33-year-old blogger in Milwaukee who says she tries to maintain a “low-tox” lifestyle, used to cook with black plastic spoons and spatulas but now recommends that her 25,000 Instagram followers buy wood or stainless utensils instead. “What’s hard for people is the higher-quality, safer materials do tend to cost more. That’s obviously a huge hurdle,” she says. “We really have to do our due diligence and figure out what’s actually the best.”