The countertop kitchen composter is a lovely thought. Instead of a smelly bucket of vegetable scraps and coffee grounds breeding fruit flies on your counter or attracting rats to your backyard, you could just put it all into a nifty electric gadget. Then, at some undetermined point in the future, you'll have a bountiful supply of nutrient-rich compost to use in your garden.

Unfortunately, none of the more popular electric kitchen composters do exactly this. Though some of these devices are marketed as “composters” and include instruction booklets and companion apps detailing the many ways to use compost, most will only grind up and dry your food scraps. You will greatly reduce your food waste output, and it will no longer smell, but if you’re hoping to put eggshells and banana peels into a machine and magically scoop out the kind of compost you’d buy at the garden center, that’s just not going to happen.

That said, you can mix small amounts of these grounds into potting soil in tiny ratios or use them as a feeder for a “real” compost pile. But again, most of these machines are meant for reducing the volume of household food waste. This is, itself, a legitimate goal, as cast-off food makes up an estimated 24 percent of municipal solid waste, resulting in the release of methane, a destructive greenhouse gas, as it breaks down in the landfill.

Or maybe you'd just like your food grounds to be odor-free and shelf-stable before adding them to your green waste bin for municipal composting or your backyard compost. In any case, despite critics’ cries of greenwashing and corporate astroturfing, there is indeed value to these devices. They make people more aware of their food waste. They don't use a huge amount of power (around 1 kilowatt-hour was typical in my testing). And my top pick, the Reencle Essential (8/10, WIRED Recommends), even produces something close to compost.

Also, be sure to check out our guides to the Best Indoor Gardening Systems and Best Smart Bird Feeders.

Updated November 2026: I’ve added Reencle's new Essential model as my new top pick, and ensured up-to-date links and prices.

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Best Overall

As I mentioned above, none of these machines makes truly ready-to-use, biologically stable, fully decomposed compost, but Reencle comes closest to creating what you'd scoop out of a traditional compost bin or pile. Popular in South Korea years before it appeared in the US, Reencle machines arrive with a starter bag of Reencle Compost Starter (which you can purchase separately for $52) containing activated carbon, wood pellets, glucose, and a trio of patented thermophilic microbes ready to chow down. There's also a prefilled charcoal filter that slots into the back.

The Essential is Reencle’s newest—and least expensive—model, with a refreshed, contemporary exterior; controls on the front instead of the top; and a lid that opens and closes manually. It's too large for a kitchen counter, but it conveniently operates much like a heated trash can. The lid opens via a manual button on the top of the unit, and in goes your organic matter. That's it. There are no cycles, tablets, or auxiliary buckets to worry about, and the cycle is barely louder than a refrigerator fan—about 28 decibels. Within hours to days, depending on the item, the scraps break down into a material resembling a cross between dirt and sawdust.

The smell isn't always pleasant, but you can usually mitigate this with the control panel's Dry and Purify buttons or by adding what, in composting lexicon, is called “browns”—dry, carbon-rich materials, like bread or shredded paper. The Reencle also tends not to stink when you feed it its preferred diet of 1.5 to 2.2 pounds of scraps per day. Unlike other machines, it can also accept meat and dairy.