American households chuck millions of tons of food every year, sending organic materials on a one-way trip to the landfill, where they break down and belch methane, a greenhouse gas that’s orders of magnitude more potent than CO2. Globally, rotting grub accounts for as much as 10% of all planet-warming emissions.
For the still-edible bits that go into the bin, the solutions are easy: shop intentionally, eat what you buy, learn how to store it for max longevity. For the actually inedible parts—the eggshells, the coffee grounds, the zucchini butts—the answer is composting. A time-tested way to cut waste, it also can be time-consuming, labor-intensive (you might need a pitchfork), and inaccessible to folks without outdoor space. It can also stink. Kitchen composters aim to change that.
Sometimes called countertop composters or food recyclers, this new class of appliances dehydrate and grind grub, reducing its volume from a couple of liters of fresh scraps into a small pile of dried, mulchlike material. The output isn’t true compost—a bacteria-rich amalgam of food and yard waste that takes weeks or months to cultivate and acts like fertilizer—but you can spread it in the garden just the same. Countertop recyclers can churn up everything a normal compost pile accepts, like veggie scraps and coffee grounds, but they’ll also handle chicken bones, fish skin, leftovers, and some dairy.
All these products deserve a gold star for their waste-whittling ambitions, but which gets the job done best—and with as little environmental impact as possible? We fed three top models batches of food scraps and dug into their sustainability stats (how much energy they consume, their packaging, their repairability, and more) to find out.
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What we tested
In-home food recyclers come in a range of sizes—from the footprint of a compact air fryer to as big as a kitchen garbage can. We focused on countertop models because they’re often less expensive, can tuck easily underneath the upper cabinets in most kitchens, and have enough capacity to handle the food detritus that an average American household creates daily. We tested the Lomi 2, Newair Luma, and Vitamix FoodCycler FC-50. All three models essentially work the same way: You fill a bucket with scraps, turn it on, and an auger inside and a heating element go to work drying and grinding the mix. In the end, a milk carton’s worth of scraps becomes a wee pile of organic material you can sprinkle over your lawn and garden. All the devices also include a charcoal filter to absorb the inevitable odors that accompany decomposing food.
one5c’s pick: Lomi 2
The Lomi 2 ($599, $399 with a filter subscription; lomi.com) was the best countertop recycler we looked at from every angle, completing tasks quickly, quietly, and without odors—and with the best planet-loving bona fides of the bunch. The Lomi requires the least amount of energy to run, is made partially from recycled materials, and fits up to 3 liters of basic food scraps, small bones, leftover meat and seafood, and baked goods. The company also has a pipeline in place to give used devices a second life if an owner moves on.
Why it’s good
Odds are your household generates some degree of food waste daily, so the faster a machine can finish the job and get ready to accept a new batch of veggie peels or the morning’s coffee grounds, the better. When set to its fastest mode (more on modes in a second), the Lomi finished one batch in 3 hours and 45 minutes—the speediest in the lot by about 45 minutes—consuming 0.84 kilowatt hours, which is a bit more than running a toaster oven for an hour. That means you can start a load before heading to work in the morning and maybe again after dinner.
All the machines we tested churned out similarly dry and uniform material and reduced identical mounds of food-scrap mix down to about ⅓ cup. The Lomi edges ahead thanks to its ease of use. Unlike other models, it includes a free companion app with a cheat sheet spelling out what foodstuffs it can, and can’t, break down—very useful long after you’ve Marie Kondo’ed the owner’s manual—and it has a timer so you know how long until the drying and grinding cycles are finished.
All the machines we tested churned out similarly dry and uniform material and reduced our food-scrap mix down to about ⅓ cup. The Lomi edges ahead thanks to its ease of use.
The removable bucket has a PFAS-free nonstick coating so dried bits, for the most part, slide right out. Anything that clings easily rinses off—or you can stick the receptacle in the dishwasher. Along with being mostly quiet, even during grinding, we detected zero stink.
Getting back to modes: While we focused our testing on the Lomi’s speediest setting (quickness is key when you’re dealing with food scraps on the daily), its slower speed can level up the device’s output closer to true compost. “Grow” mode is designed to work with one of the company’s LomiPods, pellets of dried bacteria and fungi that zhuzh things up, microbially speaking. This process has to happen at a lower temp, so can take up to 14 hours to complete. Sold in packs, the pods start at 66 cents apiece, or are available as a subscription.
Nothing’s perfect: At 12 inches tall by 16 inches wide by 13 inches deep, the Lomi was the largest recycler we tested; it takes up about as much counter space as a double-wide air fryer. At a base price of $599, it’s also the most expensive, but you can cut the initial cost to $399 if you opt for a $20/month subscription for replacement filters and LomiPods; filters on their own start at $30 each, and you’ll need a new one about every three months. It also can’t handle all your scraps—but that’s pretty par for the course in this category. Dough, beef and pork bones, nut shells, butter and cooking oil, and overly wet, sugary, or starchy things are all no-nos.
There are also a couple of small usability issues, but nothing big enough to knock Lomi off the podium. The only dial on the front of the machine is surrounded by icons, which can feel a bit like trying to decipher hieroglyphics. The charcoal filters are a bit fussy: Other brands ship a cartridge loaded with the filter medium, which makes swapping them easy. Lomi’s are a bag of activated charcoal pellets that you pour into two receptacles in the machine. We like that this means less plastic, but it’s also a bit dusty and messy.
Why it’s sustainable
Of all the composters we tested, Lomi surpassed the competition in terms of sustainability in any way a product in this category reasonably can. (For context: Its B Corporation score, an independent measure of a firm’s social and environmental bona fides, is 116, which is well above the median of 50.9.) While we can safely assume that production emissions for this category are more or less even across the board, Lomi gains an edge because the company purchases offsets that go toward funding solar installations in India. Even without that, a device like the Lomi should earn back its greenhouse-gas impact in diverted food waste within a year. The plastic outer shell is made from recycled material, and all the packing materials it ships in can go right into the composter, so there’s zero conventional trash.
Lomi also works to help its products stay out of the landfill. The company offers a lifetime warranty to customers who opt for the subscription plan (a plain old purchase comes with one year), and runs its own take-back and refurbishment program. Lomi donates a portion of those units to schools.
Nothing’s perfect: There are a couple of aspects of Lomi’s sustainability story that are suboptimal. Carbon offsets, for instance, are often opaque (though that’s not the case here) but they’re still regarded as a form of climate delay—which is the notion that we can sustain polluting habits as long as we zero them out. Lomi is also bullish on adopting more bioplastics, which are polymers derived from plant matter instead of fossil fuels. While these materials can break down or be “compostable,” they often come with many of the same downsides as conventional plastics, in that they create micro- and nanoplastics particles and can leach chemical additives. These catches, however, are outweighed by the volume of food waste the device can keep out of the trash heap.
The runners up
Every one of these recyclers gets the job done, so there’s really no “wrong” choice if your goal is to divert food waste and avoid the work and funk of compost—without consideration for a product’s other environmental bona fides. The Newair Luma ($400, newair.com) performs well and costs a lot less than the Lomi 2 before you factor in replacement filters (these run $30 and last for 300 hours, or what our math says is around 66 cycles or two-ish months). But its capacity is lower, at 2.5 liters, and it takes about 45 minutes longer to process an equal-sized load of scraps. The slowest machine we tested, the 3-liter Vitamix FoodCycler FC-50 ($300, vitamix.com), took 8 hours to process the same volume, which means it required a little more power (1.04 kWh) per load. Unlike its competitors, its lid is solid, so you can’t peep your progress and guesstimate how much longer the cycle’s gonna run—a minor annoyance, but one just the same.
How we picked our winner
Our product recommendations are based on two parallel assessment tracks: one for performance and one for sustainability. These ratings combine to land on our final winner, which represent the ideal blend of a product that’s good for the Earth and for your life. Read more about our assessment process here.
How we tested performance
We put each of the machines through two rounds of testing. First, we filled each with the same volume (759 grams, or about 2.5 liters) of food scraps consisting of vegetable peels and scraps, oranges and their peels, pineapple peels, coffee grounds and filters, and eggshells. We ran the machines, timing how long the process took while tallying the power draw (and cost of that draw) using smart outlets. Finally, we evaluated the consistency and volume of the resulting compost. On the second test, we filled each to its max capacity, either 2.5 or 3 liters depending on the brand, using the same material from the first test, and once again measured time, power draw, and end consistency. All along we paid attention to what it was like to use, assemble, clean, load, and close each machine—and, of course, if any funky rotting smells arose.
How we scored sustainability
Our sustainability scores take into account three factors: a composter’s environmental impact at its production, what happens at its end-of-life, and the company’s environmental behavior. Production factors in where, how, and with what a product is made—as well as how it’s transported through the supply chain. End-of-life factors in the device’s repairability, if and how it enters a secondary market, and any potential toxicity it might create should it reach the landfill. The final factor accounts for actions the company takes outside the life of a product to minimize its footprint or benefit the environment—we award bonus points for transparency, as well. These scores are informed inferences based on available information, not full-blown life-cycle analyses.
Sal Vaglica is a writer focused on DIY projects and construction. He’s been a staffer at This Old House magazine, Serious Eats, and Men’s Journal, and has bylines at places ranging from Saveur to Fine Homebuilding and Popular Science.
Lizzie Horvitz is the co-founder of Finch Insights, which assesses the environmental impacts of consumer products. She’s worked on climate change mitigation for 18 years in both nonprofit and corporate settings, including at Estée Lauder and Unilever.
one5c does not earn a commission on any product purchased through our reviews.