The Most-Reviewed Kitchen Appliance Is Nine Years Old
The Instant Pot Duo has 184,432 ratings, more than anything else on the small appliance chart. It ranks twentieth. That gap is the useful part.
Idunn kept the apples that held the gods’ youth, and the moment she was carried off to Jotunheim they began to grey and stiffen within days. Everything in Asgard aged normally. One thing in the hall did not, and its value was not obvious until you looked at what was happening to everything around it.
One number, and it is at number twenty
Amazon’s kitchen small appliances chart is ranked by units sold this week. Read the review counts instead and the order changes completely.
The Instant Pot Duo carries 184,432 ratings — more than any other product on the chart — and it sits at number twenty.
The two products closest to it in trust are an egg cooker at 137,207 ratings sitting at two and a personal blender at 120,931 sitting at seven. Meanwhile the actual top of the chart is a slim toaster at 20,334 ratings, with a personal blender at 5,920 just behind it.
Nothing is wrong. The two numbers simply measure different things: rank is this week, review count is nine years.
What the gap actually tells you
A product with an enormous review count and a middling rank has been bought by a very large number of people over a very long time, and is still being bought now. That is a different and better signal than being briefly at the top of a list.
A product with a high rank and a small review count is new. It might be excellent. Nobody knows yet, including the chart.
We have now seen this shape on three separate charts in one morning — the most-reviewed dog grooming product ranks fifteenth, the most-reviewed home storage product ranks seventeenth, the most-reviewed kitchen appliance ranks twentieth. On every chart we read, the deepest-trusted product was outside the top ten. If you take one habit from this site, take that one: sort by reviews, not by rank, and then read why the top of the list is different.
Nine years on, is it still the answer?
The Instant Pot’s specific case is interesting because the company went bankrupt in 2023 and the product did not care. It kept selling. It is still here, and the reason is that a pressure cooker is genuinely a category of one — nothing else takes dried beans to dinner in forty minutes, and no air fryer, multi-cooker or countertop oven has taken that job away.
What has changed is that it is no longer novel, so it has stopped being bought for excitement and is now bought for use. That is what a twentieth-place rank with a first-place review count looks like from the inside.
We cover what it actually replaces in One Pan That Does Most of Dinner, which is why the picks above are the other long-lived appliances on this chart rather than the pot itself.
Where these picks came from, honestly
Ranks, ratings and review counts read straight off Amazon’s kitchen small appliances chart this morning, best-sellers first, and every candidate checked against the ten kitchen articles already on this site. Chart node 289913.
These are research picks with one lived exception. The pressure cooker observation comes from a household that owns one and uses it weekly. The reasoning about slow cooker fill levels and blender cup crazing is general.
The one honest warning
Three of the top fourteen products on this chart are Keurigs, and one of them holds 3.9 stars across 31,451 ratings — the lowest score on the entire list.
Single-serve pod machines occupy the top of this chart for a reason that has nothing to do with how good they are: they are the classic razor-and-blades product, sold cheaply and then earning on pods forever, and they are bought constantly as gifts.
The 3.9-star model is instructive. Thirty-one thousand people rated it and the average landed below four, which on a chart where almost everything sits between 4.4 and 4.8 is a long way down. High rank, high volume, low satisfaction, and a permanent running cost — it is the exact inverse of the Instant Pot’s profile, sitting a few places above it on the same page.
The picks
Crock-Pot 7-Quart Manual Slow Cooker
Number twelve at 4.6 stars across 62,301 ratings, and the clearest example on this chart of an appliance that has not meaningfully changed design in decades. Manual means one dial and three settings, which is why there is nothing on it to break.
- Best for
- Big cuts, big batches, and any household that wants dinner to happen without anyone being home.
- Watch out
- Seven quarts is genuinely large and slow cookers work poorly when under half full — the food dries at the edges rather than braising. Match the size to how you actually cook, not to the biggest family meal you might one day make.
Dash Rapid Egg Cooker
Number two at 4.6 stars across 137,207 ratings, the second-most-reviewed product on the whole chart. It does one thing, it does it identically every time, and single-purpose appliances that survive this long usually deserve it.
- Best for
- Anyone who eats boiled eggs regularly and has never once got them right by timing a pan.
- Watch out
- It is a single-purpose device that takes permanent counter or cupboard space. That trade is fine at a high frequency of use and absurd at a low one, and only you know which you are.
magic bullet Personal Blender
Number seven at 4.4 stars across 120,931 ratings — the third-highest count on the chart and another design that has barely changed in a decade. Blend-in-the-cup is the format that removes the reason people stop using blenders, which is washing the jug.
- Best for
- Single smoothies, dressings, small batches, and small kitchens where a full blender will not earn its shelf.
- Watch out
- The plastic cups craze and cloud over time and the blades dull. It is a consumable appliance rather than an heirloom one, which its price reflects and its ratings quietly encode.
Cosori Electric Kettle, 1.7L
Number five at 4.5 stars across 49,411 ratings, and specified so no plastic touches the water — a detail that matters more than it sounds when the appliance's whole job is heating something you then drink.
- Best for
- Tea, French press, instant anything, and cutting several minutes off every pasta night.
- Watch out
- Hard water scales any kettle and a glass or steel one shows it immediately. That is a maintenance task, not a defect, and a kettle nobody descales will eventually taste like the inside of a kettle.
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