Best Veggie Dicers

Veggie choppers are ubiquitous on TikTok, but are any of them worth buying? We tried a bunch to find out.

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Whether you’re in a rush, you’re a busy parent packing your kid’s lunch, or you’re cooking for an elderly parent, preparing meals can feel more like busywork than crafting creative cuisine. Particularly with fruit or vegetable salads, cutting up ingredients can be time-consuming.

Enter the vegetable chopper. These gadgets can save you time and effort by reducing how much you actually have to cut by hand. And many of them are inexpensive, costing little more than $20.

The question is, how well do they actually deliver on that promise of saving time and effort? To find out, we picked six of them, ranging in price from $19 to $75, and I used them at home to slice carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, melons, apples, and cucumbers, as well as cheese and cold cuts.

The vegetable choppers I tried out for this evaluation are nearly identical in concept. They have a small grid of metal blades in a square shape measuring roughly 3x3 inches, depending on the model, with a basin to catch what gets shoved through the teeth of the grid. You put larger chunks (halved, quartered, etc.) of a vegetable or fruit on the grid and swing a hinged clamp over top that pushes the food through the blades.

In some cases, depending on the density of what you’re attempting to slice and the design of the chopper, the amount of force required might feel like a workout. Some of the choppers include swappable inserts with smaller or larger grids for smaller or larger chunks, and some included other tools like julienne cutters and graters.

But none of them created uniformly sliced results, especially with round vegetables like tomatoes or cucumbers. Also, while some of these choppers were able to mince vegetables and fruits, the softer the food, the more you’d end up with a mash rather than precisely cut-up pieces.

Most of the choppers I tried fall within a narrow price spectrum, with the exception of the model we bought for $74.95 from Williams Sonoma. Spoiler alert: It is better than the rest, if not perfect. But if you’re going to use one of these frequently it could be worth the upcharge, and yes, that’s despite the fact that other models we tried had add-ons and widgets.

In our evaluations, a choppers’ stability is pretty highly weighted because each of them has to stay still under the force of pushing food through it. Choppers that felt flimsy or that squibbed around under that pressure felt like a mess or an injury waiting to happen. Cleanup gets a thumb on the scale as well, since the choppers that were easier to mop up afterward are actually labor-saving—and the ones that made a mess aren’t saving anyone time and got a demerit.

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