The Best Food Processors, Reviewed by Our Experts

The best food processors can blitz, chop, and purée all sorts of ingredients with speed and precision. Like a proper stand mixer, these appliances are a bit of a space commitment in the kitchen. However, a food processor is a truly versatile kitchen appliance that can save you precious time—in more ways than you’d think.

• Best food processor according the Bon Appétit test kitchen: Cuisinart Custom 14-Cup Food Processor, $250 on Amazon
• Best food processor according to expert home cooks: Breville Sous Chef 16-Cup Food Processor, $300 $375 on Amazon
• Best food processor according to restaurant pros: Cuisinart 7-Cup Food Processor, $107 $130 on Amazon
• A great budget option: Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Duo Plus 12-Cup Food Processor, $65 on Amazon

Food processors are probably best known for their veggie chopping capabilities, but a good food processor is a whole lot more than just a food chopper: It’s a do-it-all kitchen tool. Bust out some creamy hummus and nut butters, grate large hunks of Parmesan in seconds, make pie crust, zoodle a zucchini, purée soup, julienne potatoes for homemade shoestring french fries.

The food processors in the Bon Appetit test kitchen have quite a bit of mileage on them, so trust that we know a thing or two about which models are the best of the best. Each of the four top picks below are excellent gadgets, so read on to find out what sets them apart from one another.

• The best food processors
• How we chose the best food processors
• Do you need a food processor and a blender?
• Deals on food processors

No editor in the Test Kitchen feels quite as strongly about food processors as Shilpa Uskokovic, whose machine of choice is the original Cuisinart 14-Cup Food Processor. “I got it 10 years ago, and I use it at least once a week,” she says, and it still performs as well as it did the day she first used it.

The Cuisinart food processor was the first food processor introduced to the American market in 1973, and in many ways it occupies the same space KitchenAid does in the stand mixer world. While Cuisinart has broadened its line with more complex models and attachments, the original no-frills design has remained largely unchanged over five decades. It has a powerful 720-watt motor, a wide feed chute for larger ingredients, and a slicing disc, a shredding disc, and a stainless-steel dough blade. As far as functional controls are concerned, some newer Cuisinarts have settings like high and low speeds, but this one features just a simple on-off switch and a pulse button.

“It’s great for chopping vegetables in bulk,” says Shilpa. “You can shred cheese. You can make dough in there, you can make batters in there. You can make soft-serve in there. I think it’s much more functional than a blender.” Fighting words these may be to a Vitamix fan, but food processors can handle a lot of jobs that even the best blenders simply can’t. The reasons being that (1) food processors don’t need a certain level of liquid to function properly like blenders do, and (2) food processors rely on a central chopping blade that processes everything in the work bowl simultaneously. Blenders have a fixed slicing blade that works from the bottom up, gradually puréeing ingredients as they sink down. Food processors can execute everything between a rough chop and a purée with consistency and speed.

To Uskokovic, this is best exemplified by making falafel: “When I make falafel at home, I only use my food processor. You can’t get that same finely-chopped-but-still-bitsy texture from anything other appliance. You would have to chop it all by hand—which is a bitch to do.”

Cuisinart sells multiple food processors with different bowl capacities, but Uskokovic strongly endorses the 14-cup capacity if you want to get the most out of your machine. This is especially true if you are interested in using it for kneading doughs, as anything smaller really cannot handle the volume of ingredients that typical bread recipes require.

One thing we product testers have come to understand about Breville is that the brand really pays attention to the details. The Breville Sous Chef’s motor is both more powerful and quieter than the Cuisinart’s. It also has the widest feed tube of any food processor we’ve tested. Its handling and ergonomics make it one of the most comfortable to use right out of the box, and the general design is intuitive. The work bowl clicks into place easily without latches or locks, and it has a streamlined design with fewer nooks and crannies that makes cleaning up less of a pain. (This matters because really no food processor is dishwasher-safe, even if the manufacturer claims it to be.)

The Sous Chef comes with several food processor attachments, including a dough blade, a reversible shredding disc, and an adjustable slicing disc with 24 settings that range from 0.3 mm to 8 mm. That last attachment allows the Sous Chef to function like an automatic (and arguably safer) mandoline slicer.

The primary drawback to the Sous Chef (and most Breville appliances) is that they can be expensive, and the 16-Cup Sous Chef will cost you notably more than the 14-Cup Cuisinart would. However, that extra capacity means you can do just about anything without worries of spillage.

One might expect a professional chef to opt for the most heavy-duty appliances out there. At least at home though, chef Anita Lo prefers the convenience and simplicity of the smaller Cuisinart food processor. “If you’re just processing a small amount of food, it just doesn’t work in a big processor.” Lo says. “Sometimes you just need a few tablespoons of something puréed or whatever and that doesn’t work with a big bowl.”

Lo has had the same 10-cup Cuisinart food processor for 25 years, and she recently purchased a 7-cup model for her place in the city where storage space is limited and has been pleased with its performance. Most of the time, Lo reaches for her food processor for making purées, mincing pestos, dicing bread crumbs, and prepping small batches of ingredients. In these instances, a larger, more full-size model would be overkill.

Lo recommends a smaller size food processor for people who predominantly cook for themselves or who have small kitchens with limited countertop or storage space. The smaller capacity might limit the capabilities of the type of food processing you can pull off, especially for bulky projects like bread or pizza dough; otherwise it will serve you well.

Do note that there are also mini food processors out there, but those are even smaller than what Lo is talking about. They typically come with a three- or four-cup capacity and are best used for potentially tedious tasks like mincing a lot of garlic or an onion.

If you’re looking for a food processor that offers versatility, a decent bowl capacity, and a price tag well under $100, this option from Hamilton Beach is the one for you. It won the budget category after some rigorous testing over at Epicurious for a few reasons: It whizzed onions into tiny pieces with just a few short pulses, shredded cheese uniformly in seconds, and churned out perfect pie dough and hummus. True to its name, it features a large chute that can easily accommodate a whole medium-size onion. It also comes with a smaller 4-cup bowl, making it an especially great pick for people who want to be able to make gazpacho for the whole family and a solo batch of pesto without the need for two different machines.

These recommendations are a result of years of head-to-head testing among our team of expert product reviews and test kitchen editors. We tried the four recommended models, along with several other Cuisinart food processors and models from brands like KitchenAid, GE, Magimix by Robot-Coupe, and Ninja. Our experts chopped onions, grated cheese, made hummus, and pulled together pie dough, looking for machines that produced even results and offered easy cleanup. Then we solicited further advice from the editors in the test kitchen as well as industry pros to find out what they use at work and at home.

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 can’t do. 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.

It’s no secret that we believe food processors are kitchen essentials worthy of a spot in your appliance lineup, which makes them especially great gadgets to snag on sale when you can. Above we’ve rounded up any models currently at a discount that we can wholeheartedly vouch for based on our testing.

Chef Anito Lo’s favorite Cuisinart model is a great option for people feeding smaller households or working in space-constrained kitchens, and you can snag it for 18% off right now at Amazon.