The 7 Best Juicers That Are Easy to Use

It’s easy to squeeze the juice out of an orange. It’s a lot more challenging to get it out of a carrot or an apple or kale. True fruit and vegetable juicing demands a dedicated machine. Juicers operate in a variety of ways, but all wring far more of the liquid nutrition out of produce than muscle power can on its own.

Nutritionists have crowed the benefits of juicing for decades, but the machines demanded dedication: They were expensive, heavy, and labor intensive. No longer. Advances in design are making them far more affordable, intuitive, and easy to operate.

Types of Juicers

Surely, you’re familiar with simple juice wringers, which use a combination of human power and a rotating head to work the juice out of citrus fruit. These simple and inexpensive machines work great for fresh-squeezed grapefruit, oranges, and lemons, but don’t work for most other produce.

To get the most of your fruits and vegetables, consider any of the three main types of juicers listed below. The objective of these juicers is to separate the liquid from the pulp and fiber. For the casual juice lover, any will do the job, but when it comes to juice fasts and diets, the extraction method matters. Better devices produce less heat, remove more fiber, and introduce less oxygen, impacting the juice’s nutritional value, digestive ease, and shelf life, respectively.

Centrifugal: A centrifugal juicer pushes the produce through a cutting screen then spins the slurry at 6,000 to 14,000 rpm. Centrifugal force pulls the juice out of the pulp. This type of juicer tends to be the most affordable and the fastest. But the high revolutions produce heat, which impacts the nutritional value.

Masticating: To include leafy greens and roots, like ginger, Pat Crocker, author of The Juicing Bible, recommends the more versatile masticating juicers. Crocker says the grinding action of these machines works better on fibrous produce. After grinding, the slurry is forced against a fine screen, separating the liquid from the solid. The process also works to make nut milks, baby food, and frozen fruit desserts. The downside is masticating juicers require produce to be cut into smaller pieces, and they also tend to be more expensive.

Hydraulic Cold Press: “Cold press juicers are the gold standard,” says Hana James, cofounder of Greenhouse, a direct-to-consumer juice company. “They produce the most alive, nutritious, and easy-to-digest juices.” This style uses hydraulic pressure to crush the juice out of the fruit and vegetables, minimizing heat, oxidation, and fiber content. But they are very expensive and harder to operate.

How We Selected

I am a lifelong juice lover. I’ve sampled everything from straight-up OJ to stuff that tastes like salad in a glass, and I’ve used a variety of juicers over the years. To dig deeper into the various options, I reached out to two juicing experts.

In 2014, Hana Green cofounded Greenhouse, a juicing bar in Toronto, Canada. She was always interested in juicing, but opening the store opened her eyes to its healing benefits. Chemo patients and people with digestive issues were regular customers. “Normally we want insoluble fiber in our food,” she says. “But digestion is one of the most energy-intensive things our body does. Without fiber, juices provide our bodies an easily absorbed surge of nutrients.” Greenhouse has since diversified into direct-to-consumer juice delivery.

Pat Crocker has a degree in food and nutrition and has spent the last 30 years focusing on how food affects our health. “Getting into juicing was inevitable,” she says. “Juices reach the body at the cellular level where all the healing happens.” The author of 24 cookbooks, including The Juicing Bible and The Smoothie Bible, she regularly integrates juicing into her nutrition routine.

Along with the pros and cons of each type of juicer, we considered a few key variables, including:

Ease of use: How difficult is it to assemble, disassemble, and clean the machine?
Prep required: The size of the opening and power of the motor determines the amount of cutting and size of produce before juicing.
Portability: How much counter and cupboard space does the juicer take up, and how heavy it is to move?
Versatility: What is the diversity of produce and nuts the juicer can handle?
Noise: How much sound does it make?

Bottom line, says Crocker: “If it’s hard to set up, difficult to clean, loud, and not intuitive to use, you won’t do it.”

Along with expert advice, I read reviews of different machines on juicing blogs and popular retail sites like Amazon, Walmart, and Wayfair. These are the eight juicers I recommend.