Microplastic-Free Kitchen Appliances

Non-Toxic Kitchen Appliances

When the Best Appliance Is Barely an Appliance

Appliances are where getting plastic out of the kitchen turns genuinely hard. A juicer, a bread machine, or a yogurt maker is a machine, and machines tend to come with plastic housings, hoppers, and food-contact parts that are difficult to avoid. So we are not going to hang a "plastic-free" label on anything with a polypropylene body and call it a day. Instead, we judge each appliance by the part that actually reaches your health: what your food and drink touch.

What you will notice about this collection is that most of our favorite picks barely qualify as appliances at all. The strongest answer to the plastic problem in this category turns out to be the oldest one, hand-powered and non-electric tools whose food-contact surfaces are glass, stainless steel, and wood, with no coating and nothing to break down. We have also included two electric machines that earn their place for what they let you make at home, and with those, we tell you plainly where the plastic still is.

Plastic-Free by Design: The Manual and Non-Electric Picks

A few of these are the cleanest tools in the entire store, because there is simply no plastic in the path your food takes.

Stainless steel and glass kitchen set with text highlighting features, including 'keolia' brand.

Two of them barely count as machines, and that is the appeal.

The Non-Electric Stainless Steel Yogurt Maker cultures a full quart of yogurt in a glass jar using nothing but retained heat, no electricity and no plastic touching your food, just a vacuum-insulated steel flask holding a glass jar at temperature while the cultures do their work. The Keolia Stainless Steel Yogurt Maker takes the same glass-jar, no-power approach and packages it as a complete kit. Both keep your yogurt against glass rather than the plastic tubs that most electric yogurt makers rely on, which is the whole reason they are here.

Lehman’s Manual Hand-Crank Ice Cream Maker on a grassy field

The Lehman's Manual Hand-Crank Ice Cream Maker is a four-quart throwback in the best sense. You turn the crank and the cold does the work, with no motor and no plastic churning bucket. It is the kind of durable, hand-powered tool that turns a Sunday afternoon into an event and lasts long enough to hand down.

Peugeot bresil coffee mill with metal bowl and handle on a white background


The Japan Deluxe Soda Siphon carbonates a full liter of water in a stainless steel bottle using standard chargers, a quiet answer to both the plastic-bottled seltzer habit and the plastic countertop carbonation machines. Your water meets steel, not plastic.


And the Peugeot Handcrafted Wood and Steel Coffee Mill grinds beans the way Peugeot has made grinders for nearly two centuries, with a hardened steel burr set in a walnut body. It is hand-powered, beautiful, and free of the plastic housings and hoppers that most electric grinders are built around.

Electric Appliances, Chosen With Eyes Open

Two machines here do plug in, and we include them because of what they let you make rather than because they are plastic-free. With both, here is the honest picture.

Zojirushi Home Bakery Supreme surrounded by various types of bread and a pizza on a wooden surface.


The Zojirushi Home Bakery Supreme is the one fully electric appliance we think clearly earns its keep, because baking your own bread is one of the most direct ways to leave behind the preservatives, dough conditioners, and plastic packaging of store loaves. The honest tradeoff is that, like nearly every bread machine, its baking pan and paddle are nonstick-coated, so this is not a no-coating appliance. What it gives you in return is full control over what goes into your bread, along with a jam setting for making preserves without commercial additives.

Omega Cold Press Hands-Free Juicer and a glass on a kitchen counter


The Omega Cold Press Masticating Juicer earns its spot by replacing plastic-bottled, pasteurized juice with fresh juice you press at home and pour straight into your own glass. Here too we will be straight with you: the auger and juicing chamber the produce is pressed against are food-grade plastic, as they are on effectively every masticating juicer, so the machine itself is not plastic-free in the way the hand tools above are. The honest case for it is that it gets you off store-bought bottled juice, and its slow cold press preserves more of the produce than a high-speed centrifugal juicer does.

How We Evaluate Appliances

We look at the part that matters most, the surfaces your food and drink actually touch, and ask whether they are inert materials like glass, stainless steel, and wood or whether they are plastic and nonstick coatings. We favor manual and non-electric tools wherever they can do the job, since they tend to keep plastic out of the food path entirely, and where an appliance does involve plastic or a coating, we say so plainly rather than hide it behind the casing. Few appliances are ever perfectly plastic-free, so the goal is keeping the most plastic out of what you eat.

Related Reading

For the bigger picture on PFAS and microplastics across the kitchen, read our non-toxic kitchen guide. To keep going, step back to the Microplastic-Free Kitchen hub for cookware, storage, and cooking tools, and if you would like a room-by-room plan, start with our DIY Healthy Home Guidebooks.

Take the Shift Further

I am Vipul, and I spent years auditing the materials and chemicals that come into our homes. I built this space to provide honest, expert-backed reviews of the products you use every day, with the reasoning shown rather than hidden behind a score. The work stays independent because it is supported directly by readers rather than by the brands being reviewed.If you want to support that work, you get access to ongoing research, deep-dive chemical notes, non-toxic living tips, and new product reviews as they are finished. Find us on Substack and Patreon:

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