Perhaps it is not surprising to hear that many of the pots and pans we use are coated in a poisonous chemical called Teflon that could seriously damage our health.
Luckily, there is an answer on the market — Caraway, a home goods brand that touts itself as being non-toxic but still high quality. Jordan Nathan founded the company after his own experience with Teflon poisoning that left him searching for a better — and healthier option.
He sat down with TechCrunch’s Found to talk about his journey of building the company and learning about how to be a founder-CEO after years of leading the kitchenware brand Vremi. He said that there are a lot of “forever chemicals” in the products that we use and that there is even legislation looking at being passed to help curb them.
“It’s really an indestructible material that’s in a ton of different products,” he told Found. “Once it’s made, it’s really hard to break down. It’s in a lot of our waterways and drinking water. And because it’s such a durable material, it’s been built into a lot of products over the last number of decades.”
He spent 18 months developing a sustainable solution, settling on ceramic as the perfect material. Nathan said it took that long to “make sure we had not just the safest coating on the market, but also one of the best from a nonstick perspective.”
Nathan said that fundraising was challenging as always, but that Caraway was able to separate itself from other DTC homeware brands by selling kitchen sets rather than individual cookware pieces. “We just had to keep grinding until we got all the yeses,” he said. “But it didn’t come all at once.”
He also went over some product launch failures he had, and the early lessons of being a founder. In the end, though, the brand has been able to stick it out and become one of the leading non-toxic kitchenware businesses in the nation.
“There’s still so much to do in the kitchen,” Nathan said. “We have a lot of product launches coming up.”
