Welcome to COPPERPANS.COM, the North American online store for Falk Copper Cookware.
Falk Culinair Copper Cookware is manufactured just north of Brussels, in Wespelaar, Belgium. Falk is a small company that, some thirty plus years ago, developed a technology that permanently bonds a very thin layer of stainless steel to a very thick layer of solid red copper. This was significant because, prior to this development, most copper cookware was tin-lined which, inherently, had limitations.
Namely, tin-lined copper has to be periodically re-tinned and can not be preheated for sautéing and such. Falk's bimetal technology has, essentially, made tin-lined copper cookware obsolete, though there are still purists that swear by it. Their argument is that stainless-lined copper cookware is not as conductive as tin-lined. While this is technically true, the difference is so small that it is not meaningful and, therefore, irrelevant. The stainless lining in our cookware is only .008" and does not affect the thermal benefits derived from the copper. Moreover, having a permanent and inert cooking surface far outweighs any nominal loss of conductivity.
In early 1996, I discovered Falk Copper Cookware while staying in Brussels and was very surprised to learn that it had no distribution in the US. Long story short, I obtained distribution rights for North America, formed a distribution company and began selling Falk through retail channels in late 1996. For a variety of reasons, Falk had limited success in this traditional way of selling.
Consequently, we opened our Yahoo! Store in June of 1999 and have been selling direct to consumers since that time. Of course, times were much different then - copper prices were around $.75/lb and in 2000 the dollar would buy about 1.2 Euros. Today (09/15/07) copper is around $3.00/lb ($3.86 on 02/28/08) and the dollar will buy less than .7 Euros. Not good for the buyer or seller of copper cookware.
Nevertheless, we continue to make, what we believe to be, the finest cookware in the world available to cooks that share our passion for cooking excellence in North America. It ain't cheap, but how do you put a price on superior performance and quality - the best that there is? Quite literally, there are no trade-up or upgrade options when you own Falk Copper Cookware. This is it.
Michael Harp, President
COPPERPANS.COM, LLC
