Celebrity Chef Cookware Collaborations Tested: Three Products Worth Knowing About

Introduction

Celebrity chef endorsements can be a mark of genuine pro-level involvement or just a marketing exercise. To find out where the line sits, three high-profile collaborations were tested with real cooking: a cast iron enamel cookware set, a Damascus chef knife, and a pair of premium stainless steel pans. Each has a famous name attached, but the depth of that chef’s involvement varies enormously, and that turns out to matter as much as the products themselves.

What Was Tested

Three products went under the spotlight: the Tom Kerridge x M&S cast iron enamel cookware set, the ProCook Tom Aikens Damascus chef knife, and the Hestan Thomas Keller stainless steel pans. Each was assessed on build quality, cooking performance, price, and how meaningful the chef’s collaboration actually is.

Tom Kerridge x M&S Cast Iron Enamel Cookware Set

This four-piece cast iron enamel set is the result of a long-running partnership between Tom Kerridge and Marks & Spencer, a relationship that started with food products in 2022 and moved into cookware in 2024. The pans use a baked-on enamel finish rather than raw cast iron, which gives them a non-stick quality and makes them easier to cook in, though enamel can chip if knocked and can pop if preheated dry for too long.

In use, they behave as expected from solid cast iron: heat them aggressively, then turn the heat down and add oil before cooking, because the pan holds heat for a long time. Caramelization happens nicely, nothing stuck badly, and the shallow pan handled four portions of a suitable dish. There are niggles, though. The join between the enamel and cast iron is rough and coarse, the stackable rim design eats into usable cooking surface on one pan, and oil pooled at the edges of one pan rather than sitting evenly in the center due to slight bowing. At around £100 for the set, it is good value compared with super-premium cookware, and the well-established chef and supermarket relationship makes the collaboration easy to trust.

ProCook Tom Aikens Damascus Chef Knife

ProCook’s collaboration with Tom Aikens is different in nature: rather than designing the knife, he came on board in 2021 as an endorsement, appearing in videos showing how to get the best out of a pre-existing ProCook product. The knife itself is a 6-inch Japanese steel chef knife with a Damascus-style pattern and a nice handle, priced at £109.

Performance is a mixed picture. Out of the box it was not sharp enough to fall through a tomato, needing a touch-up on a honing steel first, though after that it improved noticeably. The handle weight feels controlling, but all of the weight sits in the handle, and the handle-to-blade ratio feels off for this size. It shines at small prep and detailed work such as cutting against a fish bone, where it behaves almost like a large paring knife, but for general chopping a longer blade would serve better. It is a decent knife that does what it says, but at this price a razor-sharp out-of-the-box edge would be expected, and better value may be found elsewhere.

Hestan Thomas Keller Stainless Steel Pans

Hestan is one of the largest premium cookware manufacturers in the US, making commercial kitchen equipment and high-end hobs and cookers. Thomas Keller, the chef behind three-Michelin-star restaurants in both California and New York, has worked with Hestan since 2015, first adopting their range in his professional kitchens before co-designing these pans. The brand itself describes his insights as invaluable to the development and design of the products, which is a deeper level of involvement than a simple endorsement.

In cooking, the pans performed impressively. The handle has a thoughtful notch to stop the hand slipping down and burning, the rivets are flush inside for easy cleaning, and the base stays flat, holding oil evenly across the center rather than letting it pool at the edges. Heat retention is strong, the pans go through the dishwasher, and there is little about a stainless steel frying pan that could be improved here. At £215 for the two pans as a set, they are expensive, but for the right buyer, a dedicated hobbyist or someone with a private chef, they could genuinely be considered good value for pans built to last a very long time.

Overall Buying Advice: Do Chef Endorsements Matter?

The clearest lesson from testing all three: if the company a chef partners with is already excellent at what it makes, the collaboration is a genuine boost. If the company is manufacturing something anyone could put their name to, the endorsement adds little. It also pays to spend a little extra time researching the history between chef and brand before buying, because the depth of that relationship reveals a lot about how much input the chef actually had.

For anyone weighing up these three, the M&S set is the sensible value pick for everyday home cooking, the ProCook knife suits buyers who want a Japanese steel knife for fine prep work and are happy to hone it themselves, and the Hestan pans are the premium option for people who want cookware that will last decades and looks the part while doing it.

Conclusion

All three collaborations produce usable, well-made products, but they represent very different levels of chef involvement, from co-designed cookware to straightforward endorsement. The Kerridge x M&S set delivers solid everyday performance at accessible value, the ProCook knife is decent but leaves value questions open, and the Hestan Thomas Keller pans stand out as the clear performance and design benchmark of the three, if the budget stretches that far.