Le Creuset's masterplan to keep us buying £500 saucepans

Telegraph

12-04-2025

On the morning of Saturday, 9 November last year, Nick Ryder was at home in Hampshire, about to tuck into brunch with his family, when he got a call from Kim, who worked for him. 'The police are here because Andover is gridlocked,' she told him.
Ryder, 63, is the UK managing director of Le Creuset, the French cookware brand. It was holding its twice-a-year sale at its warehouse in Andover, where it shifts unpopular pots or factory seconds. Previously these events had been ticketed, with only about 50 people being let in an hour. 'But with this one, we thought we're out of Covid, we won't ticket it. Let's just let people come. And it just went mad,' says Ryder.
The queue outside the industrial estate stretched hundreds of yards, with people waiting four hours to get in, cars were abandoned on verges, people started to post TikTok videos about 'the shambles' and the 'f—king chaos' inside the warehouse, as people battled to grab a bargain by clambering over cardboard boxes. Ryder's initial reaction was one of horror and that he'd inflicted a terrible blow to the company's reputation after running the UK business for 23 years. 'Absolutely, I was concerned that we had disappointed people and there would be a huge amount of negative publicity,' he says.
But then the videos emerged of people celebrating their hauls and how they had saved £1,615 on a selection of casseroles, pans, butter dishes and oven gloves. 'I kept looking at my phone,' Ryder says, admitting he couldn't drag himself away from the reporting, which started in the Andover Advertiser but soon went national and, within days, had spread to America, New Zealand and Canada.
Online wits tried to out-pun each other about the 'pan-demonium', reporting that 'Britain's gone to pot' and the 'police are kettling the crowd' – jokes that suggested if people were prepared to take the mickey out of the company and its inability to crowd control, they might feel a level of affection towards the manufacturer, which in some critics' eyes made cookware mostly for poseurs with fat wallets (its very cheapest, small cast-iron saucepan costs £199) rather than serious cooks.
'I mean, that level of publicity and exposure has been hugely positive for the brand,' says Ryder. 'It got us top of mind with many people and we've got huge momentum as a consequence of that.'
Crucially, it suggested Le Creuset might have – to use a modish word beloved of marketing men – 'relevancy'. This is remarkable because, as of this month, the company will be 100 years old and its best-selling product is, essentially, the same product as it made a century ago: a solid, heavy, enamel-coated cast-iron casserole in the same shade: 'volcanic', the distinctive red-orange colour found in kitchens around the world.
What's the secret? How did a pricey pot end up not just surviving a century, but attracting a whole new wave of fans, prepared to queue for hours, as well as Michelin-starred chefs and countless home cooks, from David Beckham and Nigella Lawson to the Duchess of Sussex, who used a Le Creuset to cook her controversial skillet spaghetti dish on her Netflix show?
To find out, I went with Ryder to Fresnoy-le-Grand, a small town two hours east of Paris where all the cast-iron casseroles and pans are made, as they have been since 1925. Not that much of the original factory remains. 'One wall is all,' says Frédéric Sallé, 54, the director of the foundry, who is our guide for the day. He is dressed in a rather natty patterned shirt and white trousers, which seems an unlikely get-up for someone in charge of an operation that is as dirty as it is ancient. 'I like to stand out,' he laughs, in his good if accented English, as he ushers me into the foundry – where I am immediately hit not so much by the noise that requires us to shout, but the smell of iron, heavy in the air.
Ahead of us is the 'melting platform', where the molten metal is created in a vast electromagnetic furnace from a mixture of pig iron from Brazil, carbon and recycled steel. I can see scrap metal through the flames: poles, panels and what looks like a bicycle wheel. The digital panel above says the temperature is 1,539C.
'It is just like a recipe,' says Sallé of the raw ingredients. He shows me an area to the side of the furnace where barrels of silicon carbide and coke sit. 'And this is our salt and pepper. It's like cooking.' These seasonings are what make the iron malleable enough to turn into heart-shaped pots and pumpkin-shaped dishes.
Though there are computers, it is a satisfyingly physical operation. Red-hot liquid metal is being poured into a vast crucible – or 'le creuset', in French – which gives the company its name. 'This is the same idea as 3,000 years ago – it is the same principle, the same knowledge,' says Sallé. Iron Age technology that has survived into the 21st century.
The liquid metal is then transported to the other side of the factory to be made into more than 10,000 pots and pans a day. This is done by pouring the metal into moulds.
In a warehouse, next to the furnace, is a library of moulds – more than 500 lids, dishes, cocottes and saucepans – neatly stacked floor to ceiling, all with a label: 'marmite 18cm', 'faitout campagnard 30cm' ('country stewpot'), 'poêle 26cm'. The Telegraph photographer is not allowed to take pictures here. Only one of these master moulds for each pan exists and, Sallé explains, they are commercially sensitive.
The master moulds are used to create thousands of one-off, temporary moulds every day. In a process every child who has played in a sandpit would recognise, the master moulds are pushed into soft, black sand to make a void – into the void the liquid iron is poured and then cooled, before the sand is shaken off by a vibrating, noisy conveyor belt. The sand coats everything in the factory with a fine dusting of black, except, it would seem, Sallé's trousers.
Workers, wearing heatproof gloves, grab the still hot pots, inspect them for flaws, and start stacking them, ready to be taken off to be sanded and then enamelled. I notice a health and safety sign, warning them to use two hands for anything weighing more than 10kg.
Of course, some of the larger pots are this heavy. I own a 28cm round Le Creuset casserole, weighing 6.75kg, which lives (inexplicably) in a cupboard above the fridge. Every time I get it down, I fear I'm going to give myself a hernia or possibly a broken toe.
In the shop, next to the factory, Le Creuset sells a €639 (£535) 'goose pot', a vast oval vessel with a 40cm lid, able to hold 13.9 litres and weighing a hefty 11.44kg – that's before any festive bird has been plonked inside. Sallé, a father of five, claims it is practical. 'I use it the whole time.' For a goose? 'Yeah, sure. Just last weekend, I had more than 10, 12 teenagers at home. It was a blanquette de veau.'
But surely making pots this heavy puts Le Creuset at a disadvantage? How many pensioners, or Ozempic-skinny influencers, want to handle such monsters? 'We do see when people get to their 70s, usage goes down a bit because of the weight,' Ryder admits.
Plus, there are new brands of cookware on the market using lightweight materials, notably HexClad and Our Place, which has gained a cult following for its 'Perfect Pot', made from a type of ceramic, which weighs 2kg, compared with 5.7kg for the equivalent-sized Le Creuset.
Isn't this a problem for the French grande dame? 'No, not at all. It's really great,' insists Ryder. 'Inherently, cookware is a dull and boring category. So people like HexClad [or Our Place] bringing more awareness to this category is actually a very positive thing, because it takes the focus away from TVs or iPhones or whatever, and makes cookware suddenly a bit more sexy and a bit more interesting.'
To fans, nothing can replicate the heft of cast-iron for slow cooking. One of those is the chef Tom Aikens who owns the Michelin-starred Muse. He has 14 Le Creuset products, including some vintage ones he's picked up on eBay, which he reckons might be 50 years old, such as a cast-iron gratin dish (no longer in production) ideal for cauliflower cheese.
'It's not just the durability,' he says. 'It's the disbursement of heat – the heat spreads more evenly around the bottom and the sides, so you get better caramelisation. With stainless steel pots you sometimes get burning, but not so much with a Le Creuset because those heavy lids trap in the steam better.'
He actively likes the weight. 'I do my big seven-hour shoulder of lamb, slow-cooked with balsamic vinegar in my biggest Le Creuset. There's something nice about a heavy pan, and its resistance to being knocked about. But I'm old school.'
Even weightier is the price. The best-selling pot is the 24cm casserole, costing £305 – up from £225 just before Covid, a serious sum of money considering you could buy the same size pot from John Lewis for £65 and from ProCook for £58.
Ryder talks about his products being 'investment pieces' and the company makes a big show of its lifetime guarantee: 'If you're buying a £300 pot, we want to offer reassurances.'
The promise, however, only protects the consumer against manufacturing defects, not wear and tear. I show a picture of my loved, but very stained, casserole to Ryder, who seems genuinely appalled at how I've treated it. 'I've never seen one like this,' he says. He asks that I send him more photos, promising he'll get his customer care team to investigate. I start to secretly hope he'll send me a replacement pot but the next day he emails instructions about how to get rid of the stains by making a paste from non-biological washing powder – a method that fails to work.
For now, most consumers don't seem to be put off by the weight, cost or the difficulty of getting a replacement. The company is private, owned since 1988 by Paul van Zuydam, 87, a South African who lives in Switzerland and does not publish any financial data. But its UK arm – its second biggest market after the USA and well ahead of France – does.
It had a bad 2022, slumping after a Covid boom, when many consumers spent their cancelled-holiday money on sprucing up their homes. But in 2023, sales ticked up 2 per cent to £48.7 million in the UK and, though it hasn't released its 2024 figures, Ryder says sales climbed to over £52 million last year. 'We've had a huge bounceback.'
Cast-iron has gone in and out of fashion, but took off in the UK thanks to the publication in 1962 of Elizabeth David's Cooking with Le Creuset & Cousances (the latter was then a sister brand to Le Creuset). The legendary British cookery writer wrote how she first bought some dishes in Marseille before the war and 'they never played me an unwelcome trick. They were cheerful and clean-looking. They looked civilised on the table.' They were, she discovered, some of the first pots that the French company had made.
Her recipes included sole baked in vermouth, stuffed mushrooms and cold chicken veronica – 'a fat, boiling fowl', gently poached and dressed in a cream and sherry sauce.
Next to the foundry, the company has a small museum, open only to employees and guests. There you can see some of its first pots, made in 1925, by a pair of Belgians who had chosen Fresnoy-le-Grand because it was close to the railway, bringing coal and iron. They were decorated in the volcanic shade of red-orange, to represent the heat and fire of molten iron, and nearly identical – with the exception of the lid handle – to the modern-day casseroles.
There's a griddle pan in a lemon shade they call Elysée yellow – the colour Marilyn Monroe had a set in. When hers were sold at auction at Christie's in 1999, they fetched $25,300 (£19,600).
Also on view are some limited-edition pots, from a pink one with white cherry blossoms – designed for the Japanese market – to a black Darth Vader cocotte made to celebrate the ninth Star Wars film in 2019. There has even been a Disney range, with Mickey Mouse ears enamelled on to the lid.
One can only imagine what Elizabeth David would make of these, but Marianna Spiliotopoulos, head of marketing in the UK, says: 'They're actually seen as collectable pieces.'
It is true that Le Creuset has superfans. Spiliotopoulos, 43, who is showing me around the museum, estimates that maybe just 20 per cent of the customers are responsible for 80 per cent of the company's sales. 'We know they have large collections because they share pictures with us of what they're constantly buying into.'
During the early 2000s, Le Creuset fell out of fashion, in part because its signature colour clashed with the all-white kitchen aesthetic that was embraced by so many consumers. But more recently, the company has breathlessly embraced colour, talking about the 'rainbow' effect it creates in its shop windows, enticing high-street shoppers to step inside.
It has also helped win over an army of influencers on social media where a 'pop of colour' is crucial for images to stand out. Nigella Lawson recently posted a recipe for her sunshine soup in a bright yellow Le Creuset. Thomas Straker, the restaurateur with 2.5 million followers on Instagram, broadcast a series of 'One Pot' recipes – all cooked in differently coloured Le Creuset casseroles. Emily English, 29, who has 1.7 million followers for her Em the Nutritionist account on Instagram, says she uses her differently coloured pots constantly because they're so hard-wearing but adds: 'They photograph beautifully – I keep mine pride of place on my hob always as it's almost a design feature in my kitchen.'
Since 2021, the company has launched seven new shades: bamboo, shell pink, garnet, pêche, thyme, white and sea salt, which Spiliotopoulos describes as a version of 'millennial grey… it's very popular with younger consumers – it's a version of a neutral'.
A notable hit has been the £295 sea salt petal casserole – a standard £265 dish with a petal pattern on the lid. It was a design dreamt up by the marketing team and its success has taken Ryder by surprise. 'I thought: why would I pay a premium for a different lid design? I was completely wrong,' adding self-effacingly, 'I don't think it's appealing to old blokes.'
Ryder started his career at Gillette, the razor company that famously made its fortune by selling cheap razors to encourage consumers to keep buying expensive blades. He says he thinks about this a lot. 'It'd be amazing to get something in cookware that… has this repeat purchase, so they come back all the time.'
He's yet to crack this magic formula, but regular new colours are a similar tactic. It's a dangerous game, though. There are plenty of brands that have come unstuck chasing younger consumers. 'We're not a fad,' insists Spiliotopoulos. 'We've been around for 100 years. We are a brand that attracts loyalty and continuity.'
For its centenary it is releasing yet another colour, flamme dorée (golden flame), which has a sheen thanks to the addition of a glitter in the enamel.
Sallé says, only half-jokingly: 'Oh, the marketing people! They give me ulcers,' explaining the requests for new colours and shapes makes production in the foundry tricky. Each new colour requires endless testing to ensure it can survive the 840C temperature of the kiln.
The colour, however, that remains the most popular – from £17 mugs to £425 casseroles is the original: volcanic. It is hard to escape in the factory, certainly where the enamel is applied, the last section we visit.
Enamel is a mixture of glass – crushed up into a powder – clay, pigment and water, which is sprayed on to the pot to give it not just its vibrant colour, but also a protective layer. Elizabeth David called the pots 'vitrified cast-iron ware'.
It is applied in a surprisingly lo-tech way. The pots move slowly down a line spinning through a misty wall of orange spray, but then a worker has to carefully and swiftly wipe the rim of each pot with a sponge. I briefly chat to Stephy, 25, a former dog groomer who has swapped cleaning poodles for wiping excess paint off casserole rims for the minimum wage of €11.88 an hour.
After it has been dried in an oven, another worker has to use a scouring glove to wipe yet more colour from the handles, before it is fired at 840C to turn the powdered enamel into a smooth surface. I remark to Sallé that there must be a robot who could do it more efficiently. 'It has to be done like this, we have so many different shapes,' he shrugs.
Ryder says the fact the pots are still made in France, in a laboriously manual process, is partly why the brand has survived a century. 'It maintains the ethos of what the brand is all about – namely, people take time and effort in creating it.'
In an air-fryer age, maybe we should take heart that there is still a place for a slow-cooked meal in a slowly made pot.