business
Who Owns Pyrex?
In brief
Who owns Pyrex?
Corning Incorporated owns the trademark and has never sold it. It has not made a Pyrex mixing bowl since the 1990s, but PYREX still appears on the list of principal trademarks in Corning's annual report, and Corning still sells PYREX laboratory glassware. What Corning gave away were licences - one for Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 1994, one for the Americas and Asia in 1998. Two different companies, owned by two different private-capital groups, now make the cookware.
The quickest way to tell which one you own is to look at the letters. PYREX in capitals is the European licensee's borosilicate glass. Lower-case pyrex is the American licensee's tempered soda-lime.
The clue is stamped on the bottom of the dish
Almost no consumer brand carries its own ownership history in its logotype. Pyrex does. Turn the dish over. If the mark reads PYREX in full capitals, it was almost certainly made in Châteauroux, France, by International Cookware SAS, from borosilicate glass. If it reads pyrex in lower case, it belongs to the American licence, and it is tempered soda-lime glass.
The Corning Museum of Glass, which holds the company's archive, is careful about how far this rule stretches. The change from upper to lower case "signified a re-branding of the trademark Pyrex in the late 1970s but is not a conclusive way to determine, historically, what type of glass formulation the product is made from". More than 150 glass compositions have been used for Pyrex products since 1915, and different Corning plants ran different recipes at the same time. libanswers.cmog.org
So the letters are not a reliable guide to a piece of vintage glass in a charity shop. For anything on sale today, they are an almost perfect guide - because today the two cases correspond to two separate legal territories, two separate manufacturers and two separate owners.
| PYREX | pyrex | |
|---|---|---|
| Territory | Europe, Middle East, Africa | United States, Canada, Latin America, much of Asia-Pacific |
| Trademark owner | Corning Incorporated | Corning Incorporated |
| Licensee | International Cookware SAS | Corelle Brands |
| Who controls the licensee | Kartesia, a pan-European credit fund, since April 2020 | Centre Lane Partners, a New York private-capital firm, after the 2023 bankruptcy |
| Glass | Tempered borosilicate | Tempered soda-lime |
| Made at | Châteauroux, France | Lancaster, Ohio, since April 2025 (previously Charleroi, Pennsylvania) |
| Logo case | Upper | Lower |
Licence structure per Corning's 2024 annual report and the licensees' own trademark notices. The European site states plainly that "Pyrex is a trademark of Corning Incorporated used under license by International Cookware". pyrex.eu
Corning kept the word and sold the furnaces
The business began, in Corning's own account filed with the SEC, "as an unincorporated division of Corning Incorporated in 1915 with the invention of the heat-resistant glass that has become known as Pyrex glassware". For eight decades the same company owned the name, the recipe and the ovenware factories. sec.gov
The first split was geographic. In November 1994 Corning sold the subsidiaries through which its consumer business ran in Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Africa to Newell, and granted Newell "the exclusive right to use the Pyrex and Visions trademarks within the Territory". That single clause is why a French factory is entitled to stamp a Corning trademark on a baking dish today.
The second split was the whole American business. On 1 April 1998 Corning Consumer Products Company was recapitalised, with an affiliate of Borden - then a Kohlberg Kravis Roberts portfolio company - taking control. Borden's own 10-K filing puts the transaction at "approximately $603" million. sec.gov
The terms of what Corning handed over are unusually generous, and they explain why no one has been able to buy the brand outright since. Corning granted the buyer a "fully paid, royalty-free" exclusive licence to use the Pyrex trademark in housewares and durable consumer products, for a ten-year term "renewable at the option of the Company on the same terms and conditions for an unlimited number of successive ten-year terms" - and expressly "subject to the prior exclusive licences granted to Newell". A perpetual, cost-free licence over the name, in two carved-up territories, with the freehold retained.
Corning has not made a Pyrex baking dish in nearly thirty years. It still owns the word.
That retained ownership is not a technicality. In the annual report Corning filed on 13 February 2025, PYREX appears in the list of the company's principal trademarks, alongside Gorilla and Steuben, and Corning states that it sells life-sciences products "under the Corning, Falcon, PYREX and Axygen brands". The laboratory glassware business never left. Only the kitchen did. sec.gov
Four things called Pyrex, four owners
Figure
One trademark, sliced four ways
1 · The mark
The word itself
Owned by Corning Incorporated, a New York-listed company, and never sold. Everything else on this list is a licence granted out of it.
2 · The laboratory
PYREX labware
Still Corning's own business, sold through Corning Life Sciences. The beakers in a school chemistry lab are the only Pyrex that Corning still makes itself.
3 · The EMEA licence
PYREX cookware
Held by International Cookware SAS of Châteauroux, controlled by the credit fund Kartesia. Borosilicate, made in France, sold across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
4 · The Americas licence
pyrex cookware
Held by Corelle Brands, which has passed through two bankruptcies and five owners since 1998 and is now controlled by Centre Lane Partners. Tempered soda-lime, made in Ohio.
A consumer buying "Pyrex" in London and one buying "Pyrex" in Ohio are buying from unrelated companies on different continents making a different material.
The American licence has changed hands five times
The European licence has been comparatively settled: Newell to Arc International in 2006, then out of Arc in 2014 to an American fund, then to Kartesia, which took majority equity in April 2020 and describes International Cookware as operating under an "exclusive licencing agreement granted by Corning Inc and Corning Limited" across EMEA. The Châteauroux plant, which turned fifty that year, houses what Kartesia calls the largest borosilicate furnace in the world. kartesia.com
The American licence has had a rougher time.
| Date | Holder of the US licence | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 1 April 1998 | Corning Consumer Products Co. | Recapitalised at approx. $603m; control passes to a Borden affiliate under KKR. |
| 2000 | World Kitchen | Renamed, as the agreement to use the Corning name ran out. Filed for Chapter 11 in 2002. |
| April 2017 | Cornell Capital | The private investment firm acquires the business; it is renamed Corelle Brands in 2018. |
| 4 March 2019 | Instant Brands | Corelle Brands merges with the maker of the Instant Pot. Pyrex and a pressure cooker end up in the same company. |
| 12 June 2023 | Instant Brands, in Chapter 11 | Files in the Southern District of Texas. The appliances business is sold to Centre Lane Partners that November. |
| 27 February 2024 | Corelle Brands Acquisition Holdings | Emerges from bankruptcy. Over $390m of term-loan claims are converted into 100 per cent of the new equity. |
Merger terms per the 4 March 2019 announcement; emergence terms per Davis Polk, counsel to the debtors. prnewswire.com · davispolk.com
The last row is the one that matters for the ownership question, and it is worth reading precisely. The housewares business was not bought at auction in the ordinary way. Its lenders took the keys: holders of the pre-petition term loan swapped their debt for all of the equity. Centre Lane Partners, which had already bought the appliances arm and which also owns the American glassware maker Anchor Hocking, is the party that emerged in control - and is named as such, alongside Corelle Brands Acquisition Holdings LLC and Anchor Hocking Holdings, Inc., in litigation filed the following autumn.
What happened at Charleroi
American Pyrex had been made in one place for a very long time. The Charleroi plant on the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania started life in 1893 as the Macbeth-Evans Glass Company, making lamp chimneys and railroad lights; Corning Glass Works bought it in 1936; and in 1999 the licensee consolidated all Pyrex production there.
In September 2024 the workforce learned that production would move to Anchor Hocking's plant in Lancaster, Ohio - the sister company under the same private-capital owner. On 31 October 2024 the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania sued, filing an antitrust complaint in the Western District of Pennsylvania against Centre Lane Partners, Corelle Brands Acquisition Holdings and Anchor Hocking Holdings, arguing that closing Charleroi and folding its output into a competing plant under common ownership would reduce competition. Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan denied the injunction in November, finding the evidence insufficient. courtlistener.com
The last day of production at Charleroi was 11 April 2025, after 132 years. About 300 jobs went; the glassmaking equipment was trucked to Ohio. As of July 2026 the 26-acre site was on the market. triblive.com
The $129,416 measuring cup
The clearest evidence that the American Pyrex licence and the American Pyrex factory had come apart is a Federal Trade Commission enforcement action. During the pandemic baking boom the licensee could not meet Amazon demand for its glass measuring cup sets from US production. From March 2021 to May 2022 it made some of them in China - and went on marketing them as "Made in USA", with copy about the company's "made in the USA heritage" and products being "American as Apple Pie", while the cups themselves were stamped "Made in China".
More than 110,000 units were sold that way. On 18 January 2023 the FTC announced an order, agreed by the company, requiring Instant Brands to stop and to pay a judgment of $129,416. ftc.gov
On 1 October 2024 the Commission sent out the money: more than $88,000 in refunds to 10,259 consumers. ftc.gov The sums are small. The point is not the money. It is that "Pyrex" had become a mark that could be applied to glass from anywhere, by a licensee, with the trademark owner nowhere in the transaction.
The glass question, handled carefully
The composition difference is real and not in dispute. Borosilicate glass has a low coefficient of thermal expansion, roughly a third that of soda-lime glass, which is the property that made Pyrex famous in 1915: heat one part of it faster than another and it strains less, so it is less likely to crack. Soda-lime glass expands more, and is instead strengthened by thermal tempering, which puts the surface into compression. Tempering makes glass markedly better at surviving knocks and drops, and it changes how it fails - into many small blunt fragments rather than long shards.
What is contested is which trade-off is better in a domestic oven, and the answer is genuinely less clear-cut than the internet suggests.
What the record establishes
The switch predates the sale. The change to tempered soda-lime in the United States was not something a private-equity owner did after 1998. Anchor Hocking has said the industry phased borosilicate out by the early 1980s, and the licensee has said the Charleroi plant used tempered soda-lime for some sixty years, first under Corning. A Corning spokeswoman has said the company made Pyrex from both formulations at several locations before selling the business.
What remains disputed
Thermal shock performance. Consumer Reports tested both in January 2011 and found borosilicate more resistant to thermal-shock breakage, while acknowledging that its test conditions were contrary to the manufacturers' own instructions. Anchor Hocking's published position is the opposite: that tempered soda-lime is "at least equal to or better than annealed borosilicate products in thermal shock resistance".
On the regulatory record: there has never been a recall of Pyrex glass bakeware in the United States. In the same 2011 work, the Consumer Product Safety Commission's injury sampling produced a national estimate of roughly 11,882 glass-bakeware injuries over 1998 to 2007, but that figure covers all brands and includes glassware broken by being dropped, with no breakdown by manufacturer or by cause. It is not evidence about Pyrex specifically, and it should not be used as though it were. snopes.com · anchorhocking.com
The honest summary is this. The European product is borosilicate and the American product is not; both makers publish care instructions that rule out the moves most likely to break either one; and the strongest sourced statement available is a comparative laboratory finding, not a safety verdict from a regulator.
Frequently asked questions
Does Corning still own Pyrex?
Yes, the trademark. PYREX is listed among Corning Incorporated's principal trademarks in its 2024 annual report, and Corning still sells PYREX laboratory glassware. It sold the cookware businesses - Europe in 1994, the Americas in 1998 - and licensed the name to the buyers.
Is European PYREX really different from American pyrex?
Yes. They are different materials made by unrelated companies. European PYREX is tempered borosilicate glass made by International Cookware SAS in Châteauroux, France. American pyrex is tempered soda-lime glass made by Corelle Brands. Only the licensed trademark is common to both.
Does the capital-letter logo prove I have borosilicate?
For anything currently on sale, effectively yes, because the cases now map onto separate territories. For older glass, no. The Corning Museum of Glass warns that the case change was a 1970s rebrand and is not a conclusive guide to the formulation of a vintage piece.
Who owns Pyrex after the Instant Brands bankruptcy?
Corning still owns the mark. The US licence sits with the reorganised housewares company, Corelle Brands Acquisition Holdings, which emerged on 27 February 2024 with its term-loan lenders holding all the equity, and which is controlled by Centre Lane Partners. Centre Lane also owns Anchor Hocking and the Instant Pot appliances business.
Is Pyrex still made in America?
Yes, but not where it was. The Charleroi, Pennsylvania plant that made Pyrex from 1999 closed on 11 April 2025 with about 300 job losses, and the equipment moved to Anchor Hocking's plant in Lancaster, Ohio. Some Pyrex-branded measuring cups were also made in China between March 2021 and May 2022, which is what triggered the FTC case.
Can I still buy borosilicate Pyrex in the United States?
Not from the American licensee, whose bakeware is tempered soda-lime. French-made PYREX is sold into the US market by importers, but the two ranges are separate businesses and the American licensee does not distribute the European product.
Key takeaways
The bottom line
- Corning Incorporated has owned the Pyrex trademark since 1915 and still does. It sold the cookware operations and kept the name.
- Two licences split the world: EMEA to Newell in November 1994, now held by International Cookware SAS under Kartesia; the Americas and Asia in the April 1998 recapitalisation, now held by Corelle Brands under Centre Lane Partners.
- The 1998 licence was royalty-free, exclusive and renewable in ten-year terms for an unlimited number of terms, which is why the brand has never been bought outright.
- The upper-case and lower-case logos correspond to those two licences, and to borosilicate versus tempered soda-lime glass, for anything currently made.
- The US licensee filed for Chapter 11 in June 2023, was handed to its lenders in February 2024, closed the Charleroi plant in April 2025, and paid the FTC $129,416 over "Made in USA" claims on Chinese-made measuring cups.
Final word
Pyrex looks like the most solid brand in the kitchen and is in fact one of the most thoroughly disassembled: a mark held by a listed materials company that no longer makes housewares, worked by two licensees on two continents out of two different glasses, one of them lately owned by its own creditors. The name survived the 1998 sale, two bankruptcies, a change of chemistry and the closure of the plant that made it for a century. Whether that counts as continuity or as the opposite is a question the letters on the underside of the dish will answer more honestly than the box it came in.