Swiss Diamond International is a Swiss based cookware company. It is a privately held company, headquartered in

Sierre Sierre (; ; ) is the capital municipality of the district of Sierre, located in the canton of Valais, Switzerland. It has a population of 18,020. Sierre is nicknamed City of the Sun () for its average of 300 days of sunshine a year. It is t ...

Switzerland Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...

and founded in 2001. The company was founded to oversee production of cookware with the coating after it was awarded a gold medal at the International Inventor’s Fair in Geneva in 1999. In addition to a variety of different cookware models, the brand features knives, blenders and a selection of silicone tools.

History

HORT Coating Center

In 1974, HORT Coating Center SA was founded in Sierre, Switzerland as a research company that explored nonstick materials and coating surfaces. HORT used wet-spraying and powder-spraying processes to coat a wide range of products, including machinery parts for airplanes, coffee makers, and Swiss watches. Prior to 1999, HORT Coating Center used a

titanium Titanium is a chemical element; it has symbol Ti and atomic number 22. Found in nature only as an oxide, it can be reduced to produce a lustrous transition metal with a silver color, low density, and high strength, resistant to corrosion in ...

-reinforced

Polytetrafluoroethylene Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) is a synthetic fluoropolymer of tetrafluoroethylene, and has numerous applications because it is chemically inert. The commonly known brand name of PTFE-based composition is Teflon by Chemours, a corporate spin-of ...

nonstick coating. In the early 1990s, the HORT Coating Center began testing methods for improving the coating, the main criteria being better hardness and thermal conductivity. These criteria led to

diamonds Diamond is a solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. Diamond is tasteless, odourless, strong, brittle solid, colourless in pure form, a poor conductor of electricity, and insol ...

, in the form of tiny particles. Diamonds are the hardest natural substance, and HORT discovered that their low

coefficient of friction Friction is the force resisting the relative motion of solid surfaces, fluid layers, and material elements sliding against each other. Types of friction include dry, fluid, lubricated, skin, and internal -- an incomplete list. The study of t ...

added to their utility as reinforcement for

nonstick coatings. The Swiss Diamond "SD" coating was released after two years of preliminary testing to determine the most cost-effective formulation and application process.

Swiss Diamond International

In 1999, HORT Coating Center received the gold medal at the International Inventor’s Fair in Geneva, for the diamond-reinforced nonstick coating. Soon after, it was revealed that the coating could be used on not only machinery parts but also on nonstick cookware, which started to appear in the marketplace in the 1950s. In 2001, HORT Coating Center became the manufacturing center for Swiss Diamond International, dedicated to the production of nonstick cookware.

Nonstick Coatings

HD Coating

As part of their research and development efforts, Swiss Diamond International developed a new formula for the coating in the early 2000s. The new coating is high-density, abbreviated "HD". By exchanging twenty per cent of the formula's components, the engineers were able to improve the coating's performance in industry-standard abrasion tests. The coating was improved by more than thirty percent in both nonstick release performance and longevity over time. The coating formula was patented by HORT Coating Center, and is used exclusively on Swiss Diamond cookware. In 2002, Swiss Diamond International released a line of induction cookware with the diamond reinforced coating.

XD Coating

Swiss Diamond also sells a proprietary XD coating as an alternative to their HD coating. The XD coating is more durable and has better food release properties.

References

{{reflist Kitchenware brands