Lodge Cast Iron

Joseph Lodge founded his foundry in 1896, and the company has cast iron in South Pittsburg ever since. After fire destroyed the original Blacklock Foundry in 1910, the family rebuilt three months later under the Lodge name. They survived the Depression by making cast iron garden ornaments to keep workers employed, then modernized in 1965 with one of the first automated molding machines on American soil.

In 1991 they replaced coal furnaces with electromagnetic induction melting, cutting energy use and eliminating on-site fossil fuel emissions. A decade later, in 2002, they became the first foundry to pre-season cast iron before it left the plant, a process now standard across the industry. They opened a second foundry in 2017 that added seventy-five percent to their manufacturing capacity. Today their cookware averages sixty-one percent recycled content, much of it reclaimed iron from their own production line.