Can you heat up a fry pan to 17,000 degrees Celsius or 16,648 degrees? SharkNionja who are flogging frying pans in Australia claim you can, now they are about to be taken to court with claims that this is impossible.
A class action lawsuit, which claims the advertising for SharkNinja’s nonstick cookware violates the laws of physics and thermodynamics, has kicked off in a US court with the person spearheading the campaign claiming that NASA recently said the “surface of the Sun is a blisteringly hot 17,100 degrees Celsius,” meaning SharkNinja’s manufacturing process reaches about three times that temperature.
Mann & Noble is the distributor of this product in Australia where it is sold under the Ninja brand.SharkNinja is best known in Australia for their Shark robovacs, and Ninja kitchen gadgets sold at the likes of The Good Guys and JB Hi Fi as well as Harvey Norman.
The legal actions target the Companies Premium Cookware collection, which the Company advertises as having superior nonsticking and nonflaking qualities thanks to its manufacturing process.
The frypan costs $199 in Australia, but after being discounted out to $79 locally, now has a sold-out sticker or the Company has stopped selling the product because of the legal action.
Both Myer and Catch are selling the SharkNionja product.
Most none stick pans are manufactured at 480-degrees however SharkNinja says it heats up the cookware to a maximum of 17,000 degrees Fahrenheit a process that the Company claims fuses “plasma ceramic particles” to the surface of the pan.
They claim that this process creates a super-hard textured surface that interlocks with their exclusive coating for a superior bond.But Patricia Brown, the person who filed the lawsuit in the USA as part of a class action, isn’t buying it according to documents filed in a Californian Court.
Brown claims that heating up SharkNinja’ s pans to this temperature are a “physical impossibility,” given that aluminium vaporizes into gas at 2,470 degrees Celsius.
Her claim also points out that SharkNinja advertises the pan as oven-safe up to only 260 degrees Celsius.
Some observers claim that SharkNinja’ s claims could be accurate citing an article from The Washington Post that describes a ceramic coating process that sounds close to what SharkNinja advertises:
The newest high-tech wrinkle in nonstickiness is a coating called ceramic-titanium, developed in Denmark, and used on Scanpan cookware. A mixture of titanium and a ceramic, so hot (17,000 degrees Celsius) that their atoms are broken down into a cloud of charged particles (Techspeak: a plasma), is fired at supersonic speed at the surface of an aluminium pan, where it anchors itself right into the metal, making an extremely hard, unscratchable surface.
Brown claims that SharkNinja’s claims “are little more than a glitzy, deceptive marketing technique” that convinces customers to purchase its NeverStick products, which are more expensive than the nonstick pans from competitors.
This is a court case worth watching.
