Best Kitchen Composters and Food Recyclers (2025)

Countertop kitchen The composter is a beautiful sight. Instead of a smelly bucket of vegetable scraps and coffee grounds on your counter breeding fruit flies or attracting mice to your backyard, you can simply put it in a nifty electrical gadget and you’ll have an abundant supply of nutrient-rich compost to use in your garden at some undetermined point in the future.

Unfortunately, none of the more popular electric machines on the market do this. Although some of these devices are marketed as “composters” and have instructional booklets and apps on all the ways to use compost, most kitchen composters are just going to grind and dry your food scraps. Your waste output will be greatly reduced in volume and no longer smell, but if you’re hoping to put eggshells and banana peels into a machine and expect it to magically produce the kind of real compost you buy at the garden center, it’s not going to happen.

That is, you can Mix a small amount of these grounds into potting soil in very small proportions, or use them as feeders for a “real” compost pile, but most of these machines are designed for those who want to reduce the amount of food waste their household produces. That in and of itself is a valid goal, as cast-off makes food 24 percent Municipal solid waste, resulting from its release Methane, a destructive greenhouse gasAs it breaks down in landfills.

Or you want to deodorize and shelf-stable your food storage before adding it to your green waste bin for municipal composting or your backyard compost. In any case, despite the cries of critics green wash And Corporate AstroturfingThe value of this device is still there. They make people more aware of their food waste. They don’t use as much power as you might think (around 1 kilowatt-hour is typical). And our top picks, Reencle Prime (Read our full review here), even produces some off to compost

Read on for our assessment, and once you’re done, check out some of our other stuff Kitchen Guideincluding The best coffee maker, The best toaster oven, Best Meat Subscription BoxAnd Best Meal Kit Delivery Service.

Updated October 2025: We’ve added new models of Lomi and removed a closed composter, rearranged the format of this article, and ensured up-to-date links and prices.

Best overall

As mentioned earlier, none of these machines produce truly ready-to-use compost, however (Read our full review here) comes close to a traditional compost bin. Popular in South Korea A few years before it appeared in the US, Reencle came with a starter bag of ReencleMicrobe (which can be purchased separately For $65) contains a trio of activated carbon, wood shavings, glucose, and patented microbes that are ready to chow down. There’s also a prefilled carbon filter that slots into the back.

At 14 x 15 x 22 inches, the Prime is too big for a kitchen counter but instead conveniently serves as a heated trash can. The lid can be opened via a sensor on the bottom or a button on the control panel, and in goes your organic matter. That’s it. No wheels, tablets or auxiliary buckets to worry about. Even the app is completely optional. Within hours to days, depending on the item, the scraps break down into a material resembling a cross between dirt and sawdust.

the smell Not always pleasantBut this can usually be mitigated by the dry and purge button on the control panel, or by adding what the composting lexicon calls “brown”—dry, carbon-rich materials like bread or shredded paper.

Reencle also does not smell when it is fed its preferred diet of 1.5 pounds of scraps per day. Unlike other machines, it can accept meat and dairy products. For larger families, yes Reencle Gravity ($649)which is a few inches long and can take in 3.3 pounds of waste a day. I also tested it and found it significantly quieter than the Prime – not that the Prime is noticeably louder, about 30 or so decibels, but the Gravity is almost silent, which is a nice bonus.

Once the volume fill line is reached, the Reencle grounds can be scooped out and added to potting soil at a 1:4 ratio, then left to cure for three weeks (I used a large tub in my garage), after which it can be used for both outdoor and indoor plants. I have used this resulting mixture both internally and externally to positive effect.