The Best Food Processors, Reviewed by Our Experts

The best food processor is a food processor you’ll actually want to use. Yes, these appliances can do all the dicing, chopping, mincing, kneading and pureeing that you want them to do, but they can also take up a ton of storage space, be somewhat tedious to operate, and be quite fiddly to clean. When we set out to find our favorite food processor, we wanted one that, in addition to performing the required jobs very well, was, to be blunt, not annoying.

• The best food processor overall: Breville Sous Chef 12, $300 $240 at Amazon → Read more
• The best budget food processor: Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Duo, $65 $60 at Amazon → Read more

Because, whether your cabinets can comfortably hold one or not, a food processor is an essential kitchen appliance for home cooks. It can do a lot of things a stand mixer or blender can and then some. It will serve as a grinder, a grater, a slicer, and will readily assist you in making soups, pestos, salsas, nut butters, pizza dough, or pie crusts.

We’ve been testing and retesting food processors for years, evaluating them on their performance in our test kitchen and in our own homes. Below you’ll find more on our top picks, including a super cheap budget choice, as well as details on food processors that didn't chop or dice as well.

Out of all the food processors we’ve tested, Breville’s has remained our favorite for several few years. It’s powerful, it’s consistent, and above all, it's extremely well-designed. All the components lock into place with ease—a nice contrast to fussier Cuisinart lids and work bowls. Sure Cuisinart processors have their loyalists, and we won’t deny that they are great appliances as well, but comparing the machines side-by-side it is immediately apparent that the Breville is just easier to operate.

The 12-cup capacity is the right size for the majority of tasks you might need it to handle. The work bowl is designed like a large measuring cup, with volumetric measurements on the sides of the bowl. Because the spindle that rotates the blades isn’t attached directly to the base—as is the case with many Cuisinart models, there’s no hole in the middle of the work bowl. This means you can fill it with ingredients while detached from the base, which is nice, especially if you want to avoid spilling ingredients on the electrical components of the machine.

The Sous Chef also has one of the widest feed tubes of the machines we’ve tested, which is helpful for bulky ingredients like large carrots or potatoes. However, sometimes you don’t need that big of an opening, which is why the pusher has a nesting doll design of smaller openings to help hold ingredients in place and minimize potential splash back.

The word “workhorse” gets thrown around a lot in online reviews of food processors, but it really does apply here. The Breville is powerful, with a 1000-watt motor, and does a great job circulating ingredients as it works, providing a consistent rough chop. It excelled at each test we put it through. It made exceptionally creamy hummus, grated a block of cheddar, diced onions and mixed pie crust with perfection. The stainless steel chopping blade is exceptionally sharp, and the slicing disc has adjustable width settings that provide you with the same versatility as a high-end mandoline. It’s also one of the quietest machines we tested.

Breville offers an extensive range of food processor attachments, but the basics include a slicing blade, a dough blade, a slicing disc, and a grating disc. We wouldn’t spring for the additional accoutrements unless you’ve already integrated the food processor into your cooking routine. The nice thing about Breville is that many of their machines include storage vessels for the attachments, which is better than having them float around in your kitchen junk drawer.

All in all, we’ve yet to encounter a food processor as thoughtfully designed as the Breviile Sous Chef, and think it’s a quality kitchen tool well worth the premium price.

It’s heavy, around 16 pounds That weight is helpful to keep the machine grounded, but still makes it a little bit of a bear to move if stored in a very high or very low cabinet. Also, the components are not dishwasher safe. Thankfully it is easy enough to clean though.

At nearly a quarter of the price of our winner, the Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Food Processor is a great deal. It didn’t perform as well as the Sous, but was still satisfactory across all of our tests. It’s relatively light, relying on suction cup feet instead of bulk to anchor itself to the countertop. It has a 12-cup bowl, and a generous feed chute, true to its name. Performance-wise, the only marked difference between the Hamilton Beach and the Breville came when we were pureeing things. The Big Mouth couldn’t to achieve the same silky smooth results as our winner, but pretty much everything else compared well with more expensive models. This processor has shortcomings but for less than $100, it can’t be beat.

The machine wobbles slightly, especially when it is working something wet and heavy, so it’s not a good idea to walk away from the food processor while it’s running, just in case. It’s also on the louder side, and has a limited number of attachments compared to more premium brands.

We put each machine through four different tests to evaluate different aspects of their performance. We blitzed an onion with the standard chopping blade to see how close the results were to a dice, keeping an eye out for consistency. We then grated a block of cheddar cheese using the grating disc, observing how the machine shredded cheese, and taking note of how much was left over. After that we made pie crust, utilizing the dough blade if provided, and then prepared a batch of hummus as well to evaluate how smooth each machine was capable of pureeing ingredients. We combined these observations with long term testing notes from members of our team, who live and work with different models on a regular basis.

We also looked at other design features. Since food processors can potentially be dangerous (fast spinning blade and all that), they typically come with several safeguards to prevent any accidents, like a remaining locked in the off position unless the lid is secured correctly. This is a good thing, but sometimes these safety mechanisms can make a machine more cumbersome to use. Simply put, the easier pieces clicked and locked into place, the better. As for attachments, we were more interested in practical attachments that we would actually want to use rather than an embarrassment of redundant kitchen tools that would take up even more storage space (nobody needs a regular food processor blade AND a serrated blade, for instance). Extra points went to appliances that offered ways to store the accompanying attachments.

We’ve got bad news for the kitchen appliance collection condensers out there: Depending on what you’re cooking up at home, the answer is probably yes. While the two have some overlap in the area of, say, puréeing veggies, there are a lot of tasks a food processor can accomplish that a blender simply cannot. That’s because, with the right attachments, a food processor can effectively be a grater, chopper, or dough mixer—all things even the fanciest Vitamix blender can’t do. But there are also tasks that are best done in a blender, hence the need for both: In general, anything involving a lot of liquid getting whizzed until smooth is going to be better suited for a blender. Try to make a smoothie or hot soup in the bowl of a food processor and it will likely leak out the sides or escape from the lid, unless you take care to process it in multiple batches.