Steel and Aluminum Tariff Impacts on the Cookware Industry

On March 12th and June 4th of this year, new tariffs were imposed on the imports of steel and aluminum, first at a rate of 25% then rising to 50%. A further tariff of 15% was levied on all goods from South Korea starting in August. The aim of this post is to explain:

How we are affected by these tariffs

Explain the price changes we are putting in place as a result

Explore possible implications of these tariffs on the broader cookware industry

Why are we affected by tariffs if we manufacture in the US?

Heritage Steel is proud to be one of the few cookware manufacturers remaining in the United States. When so many companies were abandoning US manufacturing and moving production abroad, we chose to stay.

Unfortunately, when so many companies do choose to offshore their production, it has wide-ranging impacts on other domestic manufacturers. For us, it meant that more and more US suppliers of our input materials stopped servicing our industry because there simply weren’t enough customers to keep their doors open.

The main material that we purchase for cookware manufacturing is cladded steel blanks. These are used by us in our presses to form all the various shapes of pots and pans that we then process and finish into the final sellable product. For decades, we were able to source cladded steel blanks from US vendors, but about 5 years ago they all officially exited that business. As far as we know at this time, there is no US-based vendor from whom we can buy this material.

Therefore, we have no choice but to import this material. The cladding process is very specialized, and there are really only a handful of vendors worldwide that have the capability, most of which are in China or South Korea. For a number of years now, we’ve worked with a South Korean vendor of this material.

Cladded blanks are made up of a combination of steel and aluminum, so as you can imagine a “steel and aluminum tariff” definitely has an impact. The net result of the tariff is that the single largest material cost for us (cladded blanks) is now 65% more expensive for us to buy (50% steel tariffs plus 15% tariff on South Korea).

The other imported input material that we use is our handle. The stainless steel handles that we attach to our cookware are made through a complex process called “lost wax investment casting”. Again, there are only a few places globally that have the capability to produce high quality pieces at a relatively large scale. The US, unfortunately, is not one of those places and as a result we are forced to import these materials.

These stainless steel handles are also fully affected by these tariffs and are now more than 50% more expensive for us to buy (steel tariff plus China-specific country tariffs).

The materials that we can and do source from the US are the ones that are less specialized: packaging, rivets, and non-cladded stainless steel blanks for our lids. But the overall impact of these tariffs on us is that the vast majority of our input material costs have increased by more than 50%.

In our ideal world, we could have a supply chain for our cookware that only buys from US sources. Unfortunately, that’s not the world that we live in, and we must do our best to play the hand that we’ve been dealt. We’re going to keep trying to find US vendors for these inputs whenever possible - if you have a lead on one, let us know!

What are the price changes?

As a result of these new tariffs, we are going to be increasing prices by about 15% on all products, effective August 1st.

Given that most all our input materials are going up in price by at least 50%, an overall increase of 15% is fairly modest. We’re able to pull that off because we are a US manufacturer – all the wages we pay to our employees and the maintenance costs of running a factory are not affected by tariffs. Put in a more technical way, the material costs of production are increased by tariffs, but the labor and overhead costs are not.

A few other pieces of context on this price increase:

The overall price increase is about 15% but the exact change varies by item

We are absorbing the majority of the cost increase ourselves and trying to pass on as little as possible to our customers

Most all of our competitors have already increased their prices, and our prices will still compare favorably against them after our price increases.

These competitors may increase their prices even more because of ongoing tariff increases (more on that below)

Exploring the wider impacts

To fully understand the wider impacts of these tariffs on the cookware industry, we first have to dive headlong into some tariff wonkery.

Throughout 2025, a wide variety of new tariffs have been implemented relying on a number of different types of legal authority:

Types of Tariff Authority Used in 2025:

Section 232: National security–based tariffs (e.g. steel, aluminum, autos)

IEEPA: Used in declared national emergencies

Section 301: Retaliatory tariffs for unfair trade practices

Section 201: Safeguards for sudden import surges

The steel and aluminum tariffs rely specifically on Section 232 authority, which has some important implications:

Recently courts have invalidated the tariffs created under the IEEPA authority, but that decision was appealed by the administration. Regardless of the eventual outcome here, Section 232 tariffs will remain in place since they are implemented under a different authority.

Unlike during the previous implementation of Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum in 2018, there is no process for exclusion. The tariff is much broader and stricter in this 2025 implementation.

In this implementation, the tariffs apply both to steel and aluminum as well as their derivate products. The 2025 update expanded the tariff scope not just to raw materials but also to a broader list of finished goods made of steel and aluminum—even if they aren’t classified as ‘derivative products’ under earlier rules.

For the cookware industry specifically, that carries a significant impact. It means that almost all forms of cookware, including stainless steel and nonstick cookware (derived primarily from aluminum) get a tariff of 50% on the full import value.

Going back to the technical language used earlier, that means that all imported cookware has a 50% tariff on all types of product costs – material, labor, and overhead.

Obviously, we don’t know the inner workings of all the various companies out there who are importing cookware, but this level of tariffs is likely to have a serious impact on their business and pricing model. We’ve already seen rising prices in the cookware industry broadly, but those prices may only reflect the impact of the initial 25% tariff and not the additional 25%. Again, we don’t have a crystal ball to predict exact impacts, but it wouldn’t be surprising to continue to see more price increases broadly over the coming months.

All of these changes are disruptive and confusing. Our job as a small manufacturer is to understand the situation we’re facing, make the best decisions we can based on that understanding while protecting our employees and customers, and to communicate clearly how we arrived at those decisions. That’s what we’re trying to do here!

Let us know if you have any questions or comments, contact us via email or social media - we always value hearing from you!