Interview with Stuysonnie Lam, Business Development Manager of Tuxton Home

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by Mehmet Kaplan

Founded in 1963, Tuxton Home is a family-owned company. Tuxton Home's focus on cookware and tableware to make their consumers' lives easier. All their products are freezer, dishwasher, microwave, and oven safe. In order to learn more about their product range and design philosophy, I spoke with Stuysonnie Lam, Business Development Manager of Tuxton Home.

Tuxton Home has been distributing restaurant-grade kitchenware for nearly four decades. Could you tell us about the history of Tuxton Home?

Tuxton® is a family-run business. It began in the 60s when my grandfather, the founder of the company, began exporting toothpaste and other household supplies from China to the US. We then expanded to designing and sourcing of home and kitchen products for brands and stores worldwide.

In the 80s, my parents expanded the business by focusing on F&B establishments, and that’s when Tuxton became more widely known in the restaurant world. Over the years, we’ve improved our formulations and manufacturing efficiencies and have stringent quality control on all our products. This is in line with our industry-leading quality promise.

Recently, we launched Tuxton Home®, a curated selection of our restaurant products combined with specialty products intentionally-designed to make life easier in the home.

"Tuxton Home is not simply a distributor". What does this mean?

We’re not simply distributing products that we find overseas; we’re designing and manufacturing items all with one goal in mind: to make our customers’ lives better.

Tuxton Home Alaska Collection Grapefruit Bowl

How do you find the right supplier that you can work properly? What are the key features that you are paying attention to about your suppliers?

Our unique position in having a very long and very close relationship with our manufacturing partners ensures that we have full control and visibility over the entire design and production of all of our products from A to Z. We have quality teams in place overseas to ensure that everything goes according to our strict manufacturing and environmental guidelines - our partners have the same core values as we do, and are committed to working together for a long, long time.

How do you ensure the sustainability of Tuxton Home quality?

With Tuxton Home, we wanted to create products that we could use ourselves in our home kitchens. We went through R&D with consumers to better understand their needs. We have been working on a slew of products created directly for consumers, while enuring the products hold to our Tuxton® quality promise.

Tuxton Home Sous Vide Pot

What type of products do you offer? How many different products do have in your collections?

Our current focus is on cookware and tableware that will help our consumers go from kitchen to table easily and without worry. We have everything from your standard restaurant items - white plates and heavy duty pots and pans that can go anywhere you need them to (Freezer! Oven! Dishwasher! I love not having to worry about throwing leftovers straight from the fridge into the oven, or the microwave and then the dishwasher; I’m all about efficiency!) - to stylish and colorful cookware collections that can also be used as beautiful serving pieces since they complement matching tabletop dinnerware and serveware collections.

In March, we launched our first specialty item - the Sous Vide Pot - that was designed to make Sous Vide cooking easier. The multifunctional pot was created to help address the major challenge that many sous vide cooks face - how to minimize evaporation while you’re sous vide-ing, and how to save energy that would be used to heat the water. We’ve calculated that with this new system, our consumers could save over 400 gallons of water a year, which has been a HUGE deal for us here in drought-ridden Southern California. Most importantly, the Sous Vide Pot also eliminates one more plastic item in your kitchen.

Tuxton Home Concentrix Frypan Cayenne

How did you decide to combine your cookware and dinnerware according to their colors? When did you start to combine colors, whose idea was?

It was about two years ago when the idea of having good quality, colorful cookware came up. I had just gotten married and my husband and I started to explore cooking and having dinner parties with friends. We ended up having a ton of dishes all the time, so I started to look for something that I could both cook and serve in and that also was, most importantly, dishwasher friendly. I looked all around but my options at the time were lightweight, cheap aluminum cookware or SUPER heavy cast iron pieces that were all “not dishwasher recommended” - PASS. There wasn’t anything out there that was functional AND stylish, and so our idea was born. Having the colors match the dinnerware was just the icing on the cake. This way, when I serve in my frypans alongside my dinnerware, the table presentation looks cohesive and put together. An added bonus - I love seeing the bright happy colors in the morning when I’m making my breakfast!

Tuxton Home Colorado Plates

What are the common features of your products?

Tuxton Home products are made to be extremely functional, and long-lasting. All our ceramic items are fully vitrified, which means that they are fired at such a high temperature that air pockets are eliminated from the entire piece - making it super strong. We are proud to offer the same industry-leading chip-free warranty on our home products as we do for our restaurant products, especially important when the busboys knock the edges of the plates against bins countertops all day long.

I’ve gifted Tuxton to friends over the years, and they all love it - all items are freezer, dishwasher, microwave, and oven safe, so they never have to worry about whether this mug or bowl goes in the microwave, or transferring leftovers to oven safe pans for reheating in the oven. All our cookware has the same heavy-duty quality control - we only use premium grade stainless steel to ensure that there is no reaction to any foods, include tiny details like pour-friendly rims, ergonomic handles, and wide-radius bottoms so you can get your spoon all the way around the edges of the pot… and ensure that all items can go into the oven and dishwasher, and on any stovetop - sometimes you just want things to be easy, you know?

Tuxton Home Concentrix 5pc Wellness Set

How often do you change up your collections? Are you constantly adding new products to your collection? or is it a periodic decision?

Our restaurantware product team is always coming up with trendy new items that restaurants are looking for, so we are lucky to be able to choose from a never-ending supply of cool products that we can adapt for Tuxton Home. Our proprietary clay formulation is the same across the board, so the only hard part is to decide what items are relevant for the home user, and that’s where our retail expertise comes in. This past year we’ve been investing a lot of effort into our specialty cookware, where we’re able to take basic cookware and elevate it. I think we’ve really found our niche in creating useful, purposeful kitchen tools that just make life easier. We do have another item in the works for Christmas that I can’t tell you about yet, but it’s definitely going on my personal wishlist!

Tuxton Home Green Bay Collection

What do you think about the power of social media in your industry? How do you use it? How can our readers follow Tuxton Home?

Social media for Tuxton Home is all about our home chefs. We want to feature them and celebrate them and encourage them to share food that they eat, recipes, or just daily life. We started out with restaurant sightings, #TuxtonSightings, because I always get sent photos from my friends who go out to eat. They would check the back of the plate at the restaurant, and more often than not, they’d spot the bowtie and send me a snap. I think when people take photos of food they’re making or eating, they’re sharing a small window of their day since we can’t all physically be together all the time. Social media allows us to connect with our friends even if we’re continents apart.

Tuxton Home Artisan Mojave

We’ve also recently been working with local chefs and home cooks to come up with #TuxtonCooks recipes to share on social media. Most recipes nowadays tell you how to cook something, but assume you already know and have the tools to cook it. For example, when my husband and I first tried to make soup, I found a recipe online that said to “use a medium pot”. I used what I thought was a medium pot, but ended up with more pot space than soup at the end of it - meaning I could have used a smaller pot, and had more room in the dishwasher for other stuff!

Similarly, some recipes call for whisking in the pot - not all pots are created equal. Some you can’t use metal utensils on, and I’m not about to go out and buy a new pot for this one recipe I’m trying. My biggest pet peeve is something like “cook on high then remove from heat” - every pan is made differently, so some pans get hotter, and stay hotter, but some pans cool down super fast after you remove it from the heat source. This changes everything when you’re working with delicate foods like scrambled eggs. So that’s where I envision our social media going - especially for cooks who are just starting out. I think sharing recipes that are created with specific tools in mind is going to be super helpful in controlling variables so that anyone just starting out can ensure the recipe is made the way it was intended. There are so many other things to deal with when learning to make a new dish, why worry about if your pot or bowls can go into the oven or not? I’m a huge fan of like-minded online communities; it’s so helpful to get advice and insight from people who have experience or are doing just as much research as you are on a topic - saves a ton of googling!

You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram @TuxtonHome, tag your #Tuxton sightings, and show us how your cooking is going at #TuxtonCooks.

Tuxton Home Concentrix Frypan Cobalt

How can our readers buy Tuxton Home products? What is Tuxton Rewards?

Tuxton Home products are available at www.TuxtonHome.com - this is where you can get all our newest products and some exclusive bundles. We also partner with a number of online retailers like Amazon, Wayfair, and Houzz. Our loyal customers sign up for Tuxton Rewards - a rewards program that allows you to earn points for sharing Tuxton with your friends, or making a purchase on our site. Those points come in handy when you inevitably want to add to your collection!

What is next?

We want to do more to give back. Currently, our foodservice team sponsors CCAP, a foundation that helps underserved teens gain the skills they need to work in and eventually run their own restaurant. We would love to find another partner who is interested in conserving our earth’s resources so we, along with our future chefs, have access to clean air, clean water, and fresh ingredients for the future.

Thank you Stuysonnie.

For more information, please visit website of Tuxton Home

This interview was conducted in a Question-and-Answer format. The answers were checked for grammar and punctuation and published without any additional editing. Tuesday, August 28, 2018. All photos are the property of their respective owners.