Best Kitchen Composters and Food Recyclers (2025)

The kitchen to install the composter is a beautiful vision. Instead of a smelly bucket full of vegetable scraps and coffee grounds that breed fruit flies on your counter or attract rats to your garden, you can simply put it all in a nifty electric gadget, and at some undetermined point in the future, you’ll have a plentiful supply of nutrient-rich compost to use in your garden.

Unfortunately, none of the most popular electric machines on the market do this. Although some of these devices are marketed as “composters” and have instruction booklets and apps detailing all the ways to use compost, the vast majority of kitchen composters simply grind and dry your food scraps. Your waste output will be significantly reduced in volume and no longer smell, but if you’re hoping to put egg shells and banana peels into a machine and magically get back the kind of real compost you’d buy at the garden center, that’s just not going to happen.

That said, you can mix small amounts of these into potting soil in very small proportions, or use them as a feeder for a “real” compost pile, but most of these machines are aimed at those who want to reduce the volume of food waste produced by their household. Which in itself is a legitimate goal, since food waste makes up 24% of municipal solid waste, leading to the release of methane, a destructive greenhouse gas, as it decomposes in landfills.

Or perhaps you would simply like your food to be odor-free and shelf-stable before adding it to your green bin for municipal composting or your garden compost. Regardless, despite criticism of greenwashing and corporate astroturfing, these devices still have value. They make people aware of their food waste. They don’t use as much power as you think (about 1 kilowatt hour was typical). And our top pick, the Reencle Prime (read our full review here), even produces something close compost.

Read on for our review, and once you’re done, check out some of our other cooking-related guides, including the best coffee makers, best toaster ovens, best meat subscription boxes, and best meal kit delivery services.

Updated October 2025: We’ve added the latest Lomi model and removed an abandoned composter, reorganized the layout of this article, and ensured up-to-date links and prices.

Best overall

Photography: Kat Merck

Réencle

Prime electric composter

As mentioned before, none of these machines produce truly ready-to-use compost, but (read our full review here) comes closest to a traditional compost bin. Popular in South Korea years before it appeared in the United States, the Reencle comes with a starter bag of ReencleMicrobe (which can be purchased separately for $65) containing activated charcoal, wood pellets, glucose, and a trio of patented microbes ready to eat. There is also a pre-filled carbon filter that fits in the back.

Photography: Kat Merck

At 14 x 15 x 22 inches, the Prime is too large for a kitchen counter, but functions more like a heated trash can. The lid can be opened via a sensor at the bottom or a button on the control panel, and your organic matter goes in. That’s it. There are no auxiliary cycles, tablets or buckets to worry about. Even the app is completely optional. Within hours or even days, according to the article, the remains are decomposed into a material resembling a cross between dirt and sawdust.

The smell isn’t always pleasant, but it can usually be reduced by the Dry and Purify buttons on the control panel or by adding what the composting lexicon calls “browns,” dry, carbon-rich materials like bread or shredded paper.

Photography: Kat Merck

The Reencle also tends not to smell when fed its preferred diet of 1.5 pounds of scraps per day. Unlike other machines, it can also accept meat and dairy products. For larger households, there’s the Reencle Gravity ($649), which is a few inches longer and can accommodate 3.3 pounds of trash per day. I also tested it and found it to be noticeably quieter than the Prime – not that the Prime is noticeably loud, only about 30 decibels or so, but the Gravity is almost silent, which is a nice bonus.

When the volume reaches the fill line, the Reencle grounds can be removed and added in a 1:4 ratio with potting soil, then allowed to cure for three weeks (I used a large vat in my garage), after which it can be used for both outdoor and indoor plants. I used this resulting mixture with positive effect both internally and externally.