Crazy for All-Clad: Cooks flock to Washington fairgrounds for annual cookware sale
While trying to keep people entertained in the waiting room for the All-Clad Metalcrafters Factory Sale, Bill Groll will ask the crowd: Who has traveled more than 50 miles to attend? One hundred miles? Five hundred miles? One thousand miles?
Once, there was a man from South Korea who said he had come to the Washington County Fairgrounds just for the sale.
“I believed him, because he bought $26,000 worth of product that day,” said Groll, All-Clad’s vice president of research and technology.
The annual factory sale draws many visitors to the county. All-Clad is a brand recognized around the globe, and its stainless-steel cookware is the preference of many professional chefs. Groll pointed out that many celebrity chefs hawking their own lines of pots and pans often still use All-Clad.
And it is all made right in Cecil Township (although the company has a Canonsburg mailing address).
Ahead of this year’s factory sale, All-Clad invited media outlets to take a peek behind the curtain at its factory off of Morganza Road where its cookware is manufactured.
Though much of the process at the facility is automated, there is still plenty of manual labor required to create the products. The factory employs 181 hourly and 60 salaried employees.
Inside the factory, large coils of metal are flattened and cut into smaller rectangles. Those smaller pieces are fed through a machine that grinds the surface to prepare them for bonding.
Employees stack stainless and steel and aluminum sheets 10 high, alternating metals, before they are put through the rolling mills.
“We have a sequence of two rolling mills. It’s just like a giant pizza oven,” Groll said.
After the metal is heated, cooled, reheated and cooled again in the rolling mills, it is cut into discs, and a machine will shape those discs into a pot or pan.
The products are buffed and polished as they continue to move through the factory. Groll explained the cookware is given a coarse finish on the bottom.
“Coarse absorbs energy,” Groll said.
According to Groll, lid production is “fairly automated,” and the lids are a solid piece of stainless steel.
One piece of All-Clad’s products not produced in the factory are the handles. Those are made in China. At the Cecil Township factory, workers attach the handles to the products as they reach the end of the production line.
All-Clad’s pots and pans are then packaged and moved to the warehouse where they will wait to be shipped.
“Our main motivation is repeatability, consistency and quality,” Groll said of the manufacturing process.
The newest products All-Clad offers contain a graphite core on the cooking surface. Nicole Christy, a research engineer at All-Clad, explained graphite heats and cools more evenly across the surface.
From idea to the factory floor, Christy said it took about five years.
“There was actually 14 of them … Fourteen iterations until we landed on this design,” Christy said.
All-Clad has been manufacturing cookware in Washington County since 1971, and the factory sale started just a few years later. The company’s products are heavily discounted at the sale when compared to purchasing them at a retail store.
This year’s sale runs from Thursday to Saturday. However, Thursday is considered “early access” for those who buy a VIP ticket. Sales from those tickets benefit Make-A-Wish Greater Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Wendy Dyer, All-Clad’s international product director, said more than 8,000 people attended last year’s sale.
“People come from everywhere. We do UPS shipping, because people will fly in, or be on the phone buying for people out of state,” Dyer said.
Dyer added the event is a boon for Washington County’s economy, as attendees who travel far and wide are staying in hotels and eating at local restaurants.
The sale takes place at the Washington County Fairgrounds, 2151 N. Main St., Washington, Pa., 15301. VIP tickets for early entry can be purchased online. The sale will be open to the general public on Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.