In 1950 two members of the Minneapolis chapter of Hadassah walked into a small aluminum shop with a heavy ceramic cake mold and asked whether anyone could make one in metal. Rose Joshua and Fannie Schanfield wanted a pan for bundkuchen — gathering cakes. H. David Dalquist said yes, cast the thing in aluminum, added folds to the fluted edges, and trademarked the name. Seventy-six years later his family still owns the company and still makes the pans in Minneapolis. The Silver Anniversary Bundt is the closest thing on the shelf to that first cast pan: Nordic Ware designed it to replicate the original. Nearly seven thousand owners rate it 4.8 out of 5.
We verify manufacturing against primary sources, read what actual owners report, and never accept payment for rankings.
So the pan is not really in question. Two other things are. The first is which pan you are actually buying, because Nordic Ware sells two different Anniversary Bundts and the retail listings do not make the difference obvious. The second is the origin claim itself, which Nordic Ware quietly rewrote in 2025 while a federal lawsuit over its old wording worked its way through a Minneapolis courtroom. That is the more interesting story, and it is the reason this review carries a qualified badge rather than a clean one.
The model number, and why it matters
Nordic Ware currently sells two cast-aluminum pans with almost the same name:
- SKU 50037 — Silver Anniversary Bundt® Pan. Designed for the company’s 60th anniversary, it closely replicates Nordic Ware’s first cast aluminum pan. Classic fluted ring, braided side handles, silver finish. This is the pan reviewed here.
- SKU 50077 — Anniversary Bundt® Pan. A different pan: sweeping tiered ridges, gold finish. Same capacity, same material, same origin badge, different shape.
The retail listing our buy button points to is titled “Nordic Ware Anniversary Bundt, 15 Cup, Silver,” which reads like the second pan and is in fact the first. Its manufacturer part number settles it: 50037, with model number 50037AMZM and UPC 011172500373. If you want the gold tiered pan, you want a different listing, and you should check the part number rather than the title before you order. Nordic Ware’s own 50077 page does not help either — its photo gallery mixes in 50037 imagery.
Both pans hold 10 to 15 cups, which is the other thing worth getting right. A great many Bundt recipes and boxed mixes are written for a 10- or 12-cup pan. This one is bigger than that. Owners who bought it deliberately — for tall pound cakes, for doubled recipes, in one case for Italian bread dough that used to climb over the sides of a smaller pan — are the happiest people in the review record. If you wanted a standard 10-cup Bundt, this is not it.
What it’s like to use
The pan is cast, not stamped, and you feel it immediately: just under two pounds of aluminum with walls thick enough that the metal, rather than your oven, decides how the outside of the cake browns. That is the entire argument for cast aluminum bakeware. Thin stamped pans scorch where the heating element points at them. This one does not.
The braided side handles are the feature owners actually write about, and they are genuinely unusual — most Bundt pans give you a bare rim and a prayer. Lifting fifteen cups of batter out of a hot oven with pot holders and no handles is how cakes end up on the floor. Several owners said, in almost the same words, that they wished every pan had them.
The interior is a silicone-based nonstick that Nordic Ware states is free of PFAS and PTFE. It is very good and it is not magic. The company’s instructions are explicit and worth following literally: brush with solid vegetable shortening and dust with flour or cocoa before every use, or use a baking spray with flour in it. Do that and release is the thing people rave about — one owner flipped a cake after five minutes of cooling and heard it hit the plate. Skip it, or use a plain oil spray, and you will fight the flutes.
The rest of the care rules are short. Oven safe to 425°F by Nordic Ware’s own spec, though the retail listing lists a lower 400°F ceiling — we report the maker’s figure and note the discrepancy. Hand wash; the dishwasher is not recommended and will shorten the coating’s life. No metal utensils, no scouring pads. Fill no more than three-quarters full, which on a fifteen-cup pan is more batter than most recipes will give you anyway.
What owners actually say
Eighty-nine percent of ratings are five stars across 6,665 of them, and the praise is monotonous in the way good products produce: releases cleanly, bakes evenly, beautiful cake, heavy enough to last. There is no manufactured balance to offer against that.
There are 169 critical reviews, and they sort into two piles that deserve very different responses.
The larger pile is condition on arrival, and it is a genuine defect rather than a quirk. Owners describe burrs and rough edges in the interior creases and along the rim, scratches cut through the nonstick, a lump of coating dried onto the interior, and in one case a pan that arrived with a piece broken. Several went through two or three units before getting a clean one; one reported the pan turning up in a generic plastic bag inside the shipping carton rather than in a Nordic Ware box, which is a tell that you may be receiving a return rather than new stock. This is the single most common complaint about this pan and it is worth being blunt about: inspect the interior before you bake on it, and send it back if the coating is scratched, lumpy or burred. Do not sand it, do not season around it. Nordic Ware’s customer service comes out of the record well — an owner who reported the coating coming off said the company shipped a replacement promptly — and the pan carries a lifetime warranty for exactly this reason.
The smaller pile is the one that goes to the product itself: the nonstick wears out. A baker who uses her pans constantly reported that the first several cakes released perfectly and that after continued heavy use they stopped doing so; she worked through Nordic Ware’s suggestions, none of them fixed it, and replacing the pan was the only thing that did. At this price, she said, that is not a cycle she can repeat, and she moved to a cheaper brand. That complaint is fair and it is structural. Cast aluminum is effectively permanent; a nonstick coating is a consumable. A home baker making a few cakes a year will likely never reach the far end of it. Someone baking several times a week will, and no cast pan from anyone solves that.
What is conspicuously missing is any complaint about the metal. Across the critical reviews we read, nobody described a pan that warped, cracked, lost a handle, or baked unevenly. Every serious complaint is about the coating or the condition it shipped in. For a piece of bakeware people keep for decades, that is the silence that matters.
Made in USA Verification
- The manufacturer’s own words: the live product page for this pan carries a flag badge reading “Made in America of domestic & imported materials” and a spec line reading Made In: America of domestic & imported materials. The retail listing repeats it: “Made in America of domestic and imported materials.” That is a qualified claim, made by the manufacturer about this exact product, and we tier it exactly as written: Made in USA with globally sourced components. We do not upgrade it, because Nordic Ware does not.
- Where it is made: Minneapolis, Minnesota. Nordic Ware’s own factory page states that the company has “manufactured Nordic Ware products in Minneapolis, Minnesota for over 75 years,” that over 400 products are made there, and that ideation, design, product development, and the transformation of raw materials into finished, packaged goods all happen in one place. Founded 1946 by H. David and Dorothy Dalquist; still family-owned and operated.
- Why the wording changed, stated plainly: Nordic Ware did not always qualify the claim. In April 2025 it was sued in federal court in Minneapolis — Kaufmann v. Nordic Ware, Inc., No. 0:25-cv-01379 (D. Minn.), filed April 11, 2025 — over “Made in the USA,” “American made” and “made in America” claims on its aluminum bakeware packaging. The complaint alleges that all or virtually all of the aluminum and bauxite used to make the bakeware comes from outside the United States, that Nordic Ware has itself acknowledged its primary component is aluminum imported from Canada, and that domestically mined bauxite has not been used to make aluminum since around 1981. The same complaint states that Nordic Ware had begun rolling out the qualified “made in America with domestic and imported materials” wording in response to a wave of Made-in-USA labeling litigation. Those are allegations, not findings.
- Where that case stands: it is pending. Legal trade press reported that the court denied Nordic Ware’s motion to dismiss and allowed the claims to proceed. We have not reviewed the docket ourselves, there has been no ruling on the merits, and nothing here is a finding that Nordic Ware did anything wrong. We report it because the qualified badge on this pan is the direct result of it, and because a reader deciding what “Made in America” buys them deserves to know that the raw aluminum in nearly all American bakeware starts overseas.
- What that does and does not change: casting, coating, finishing, packing and shipping this pan are American operations performed by Americans in Minnesota, and that is real. Smelted-in-America aluminum from American-mined bauxite is, on the complaint’s own account, not something any bakeware company can currently offer. Judge the pan on where the work happens, not on a purity standard nobody in the category meets — but do not let anyone sell you the unqualified version of the claim either.
- Warranty: Nordic Ware’s own product page states a Lifetime Warranty. The retail listing’s detail table states a twenty-year manufacturer warranty. Where they disagree we go with the manufacturer’s own page, and we flag the gap so you know to claim against Nordic Ware directly rather than through the seller.
- What we could not verify: which specific materials are the imported ones, where the nonstick coating is manufactured, and what share of the finished pan by value is domestic. Nordic Ware does not publish a component-level breakdown.
Specifications
| Model | Nordic Ware Silver Anniversary Bundt® Pan |
| Manufacturer SKU / part number | 50037 |
| Model number on the retail listing | 50037AMZM (listed as “Anniversary Bundt, 15 Cup, Silver”) |
| UPC | 011172500373 |
| Capacity | 10–15 cups (fill no more than ¾ full) |
| Material | Cast aluminum |
| Interior | Silicone-based nonstick; Nordic Ware states it is free of PFAS and PTFE |
| Weight | 1.9 lb |
| Dimensions | 10.8″ diameter, 12″ handle to handle, 4.5″ tall |
| Heat | Oven safe to 425°F per Nordic Ware (the retail listing states 400°F) |
| Care | Hand wash; dishwasher not recommended; grease and flour before every use; no metal utensils or scouring pads |
| Warranty | Lifetime Warranty per Nordic Ware (retail listing states twenty years) |
| Origin | Made in America of domestic and imported materials; manufactured in Minneapolis, Minnesota |
| Owner rating | 4.8 out of 5 — 6,665 ratings, 89 percent five stars |
Pros & Cons
Pros: Cast rather than stamped, so the metal controls the browning and the outside of the cake does not scorch where the element points; braided side handles that almost no other Bundt pan offers, and the one feature owners bring up unprompted; a generous 10-to-15-cup capacity that fits tall pound cakes, doubled recipes and bread dough that would climb out of a 10-cup pan; a silicone nonstick that Nordic Ware states is free of PFAS and PTFE, with a release owners describe as effortless when the pan is greased and floured as instructed; a Lifetime Warranty from a company whose customer service shows up in the owner record replacing pans without an argument; made in Minneapolis by the family that invented the Bundt in 1950 and still owns the plant; and 6,665 ratings at 4.8 out of 5 with no reports at all of warping, cracking or failed handles.
Cons: Condition on arrival is the dominant complaint — burrs, rough edges, scratches through the coating and blobs of nonstick, with multiple owners exchanging the pan two or three times before getting a clean one; the nonstick is a consumable and heavy bakers report release degrading after sustained use, which at this price is a real cost rather than a nuisance; hand wash only in practice, since the dishwasher shortens the coating’s life; the name is genuinely confusing, with a second, different Anniversary Bundt in the line and retail titles that do not disambiguate them; it is larger than the 10- or 12-cup pan most Bundt recipes assume; the origin claim is qualified, and Nordic Ware rewrote that wording in 2025 amid a pending federal false-advertising suit over the unqualified version; and Nordic Ware publishes no component-level breakdown of what the imported materials are.
Should You Buy It?
Yes — with one caveat.
Buy it if you want a large, heavy, handsome Bundt pan cast in Minnesota by the company that invented the form, and you bake often enough to enjoy it but not so relentlessly that you will grind through a nonstick coating in a year. The metal is not in question anywhere in the owner record — nobody reports warping, cracking or a failed handle — and the braided handles are a genuinely better idea than the bare rim every other Bundt pan gives you. The caveat is the box: this pan has a real incoming-quality problem, and a meaningful number of buyers have had to exchange one or more before getting a clean one. Open it, look inside, and if the coating is scratched, burred or lumpy, send it back rather than baking on it. Do not buy it if you wanted a standard 10-cup Bundt, if you bake professionally and will wear the coating out fast, or if you want an unqualified Made-in-USA claim — Nordic Ware does not make one for this pan, and we are not going to make one on its behalf.
The exact model we reviewed — the Nordic Ware Silver Anniversary Bundt Pan, SKU 50037 — is stocked at the Buy American Store.
Buy the Nordic Ware Silver Anniversary Bundt Pan at the Buy American Store
Check the part number, not the title. The pan you want here is 50037. The gold, tiered-ridge pan sold under a nearly identical name is SKU 50077 — a different pan.
Who Actually Makes Nordic Ware?
The Minneapolis factory the Dalquist family has run since 1946, how a request from two Hadassah members turned into the best-selling cake pan in America, and what the “domestic and imported materials” qualifier on its bakeware actually covers.