Ninja Kitchen Review – Check Your Foodi Model Number Before You Read Anything Else

Check Your Model Number First

The recalled model numbers, printed on a label on the side of the cooker:

They were sold from January 2019 through March 2025 for about $200, at Walmart, Costco, Sam’s Club, Amazon and Target, and online including at Ninjakitchen.com.

That is a six-year sales window that closed only two months before the recall. Nearly two million units, sold through the largest retailers in America, right up until March 2025. A very large number of these are in kitchens right now.

What Actually Happened to People

Recall notices are easy to skim past. The injury record here is not one to skim.

Second and third-degree burns to the face are catastrophic, permanent injuries. More than fifty of them. That is not a technical non-compliance or a precautionary withdrawal — it is a product that has seriously hurt a substantial number of people.

And the mechanism explains why the injuries are so severe. A pressure cooker holds its contents well above boiling point. An interlock is supposed to make it physically impossible to open while pressurised — that interlock is the primary safety system of the entire appliance. When it fails, the contents do not spill; they are expelled under pressure, upward, at the person standing over it. Which is why the burns are to the face.

We have covered a lot of recalls in this series. Grill brushes shedding bristles, wire brushes swallowed, ladder falls. This is the most severe injury profile we have encountered, and we would not be doing our job if we led this review with anything else.

What to Do If You Have One

Stop using the pressure cooking function and contact SharkNinja. The published contact routes are:

Two practical notes. The appliance has multiple functions — pressure cooking and air frying among them — so the recall concerns the pressure-cooking lid specifically; check what the current guidance says about the other functions rather than assuming either way.

And check separately-purchased spare lids. Replacement OP300 series lids bought as an additional part are explicitly included, and somebody who replaced a lid may not think of themselves as owning a recalled product.

If you are in Canada, there is a parallel Canadian recall for the Foodi TenderCrisp multi-cookers on the same defect.

This Category Has a Thermal Problem Generally

To be fair to SharkNinja, this is not a company-specific failing so much as an unusually severe instance of a category-wide pattern. We queried the same database for air fryers.

Six air fryer recalls sit in that database, and every one we examined is thermal — fire, burns, or both. Portable blenders have their own pattern: a 2023 recall covered 4.8 million BlendJet 2 units for fire and laceration hazards.

The honest reading: countertop appliances that combine high heat, high power and low price have a recall problem across the industry. That does not excuse a specific defect that burned more than fifty people’s faces — but it does mean switching brands is not automatically switching risk. Registering any such appliance for recall notifications is the general lesson.

The Earlier Recall

For completeness, SharkNinja appears once more in the database: a November 2015 recall of Ninja BL660 blenders following laceration injuries, to provide new warnings and instructions.

We report it as context rather than as a pattern. A warnings-and-instructions remedy is at the mild end of the recall spectrum, it was eleven years ago, and blender blade lacerations are the most common injury in that entire product class — fourteen blender recalls sit in the same database.

Two recalls in roughly a decade for a company selling this volume is not remarkable in itself. The 2025 one is remarkable because of its severity, not because of its existence.

Air Frying Does Cut the Oil

Turning to why anyone on this site would want one of these: the central health claim for air frying is real and has been measured.

That matters because oil is where the calories are. Deep frying does not just cook food in fat, it loads fat into it — and reducing absorbed oil is a calorie reduction achieved by the method rather than by willpower, which is the kind of change this site keeps finding actually lasts.

It is the same shape as findings elsewhere in this series — grilling letting fat drip away, gardening delivering exercise as a side effect of a hobby. Nobody has to sustain anything.

One scope caveat, stated honestly. That study used a prototype air jet impingement oven, which is not identical to a consumer countertop air fryer, and tested specific potato products. The direction is well supported; the exact magnitude in your kitchen is not something that paper establishes.

And One Measured Comparison Cuts the Other Way

Here is the finding that a cheerful air fryer article would not include, and it genuinely surprised us.

A 2026 study in Food Chemistry compared four domestic reheating methods for hash browns — air frying, oven baking, pan frying and deep frying — measuring flavour compounds and acrylamide formation by mass spectrometry.

Air-based heating produced more acrylamide than oil-based heating — substantially more, on those ranges.

The mechanism the authors propose is elegant and, once stated, obvious. Air transfers heat less efficiently than oil. Lower heat transfer efficiency means longer cooking, and longer cooking at acrylamide-forming temperatures forms more acrylamide. The paper found that reheating methods with low heat transfer efficiency produced more of it.

Their optimal method was not the air fryer. It was low-temperature, long-time pan frying at 160°C for three minutes.

Scope matters here too, and we will not overstate it. This was a reheating study on hash browns specifically — not a general test of cooking raw food from scratch. It is one study, in one food, in one mode of use.

How to Hold Both Findings at Once

These look contradictory and are not. They are measuring different things.

So “air frying is healthier” is too coarse a statement to be useful. It is lower in fat and calories, which is the reason most people buy one and is well supported. It is not automatically lower in every undesirable compound, and on at least one measure in at least one study it is worse.

This is the same structure we found writing about grilling, where the fat dripping away is both the calorie benefit and the mechanism forming polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Cooking methods trade one thing for another, and the honest position is to name both rather than sell one.

The Broader Case for Cooking at Home

Stepping back from the appliance to the habit it supports, there is reasonable evidence that cooking at home is associated with a better diet.

The away-from-home pattern was the most common one, at 45.9% (95% CI 43.8–48.1) — so this describes the majority pattern rather than a fringe habit.

The necessary caveat: this is cross-sectional. It shows association, not causation, and the households that cook differ from those that do not in income, time, education and much else. It does not establish that buying an appliance changes anything.

But it is a large, nationally representative sample pointing the same direction as common sense, and an appliance that makes cooking at home faster and less unpleasant is plausibly acting on the right variable. That is the honest case for the category.

The CREAMi, and What It Actually Buys You

Worth a short note because it is the product this site’s readers ask about most, and because the honest case for it is narrower than the marketing.

The CREAMi does not make ice cream lower in calories. It processes whatever you freeze into it. What it buys you is control of the ingredient list — you decide what goes in, which is a genuine advantage over a tub whose formulation is fixed.

That is a real benefit and it is worth stating precisely rather than inflating. If it results in a frozen dessert built from ingredients you chose rather than one bought at a petrol station, it is doing something useful. If it results in eating dessert more often because making it is now easy, it is working against you — and we have found no evidence either way on which happens more.

Note also that it carries the lowest commission of anything in this programme at 1.5%, and the Slushi pays nothing at all — so we have less financial reason to recommend those than anything else here, which we mention because you should know when our incentives are weakest as well as when they are strongest.

What We Could Not Verify

Pricing and warranty terms. We could not read current product pricing or warranty length, so this review makes no claim about either — beyond the recall record showing the recalled cookers retailed for about $200.

One structural note we did verify: ninjakitchen.com now redirects to sharkninja.com at the root, though deeper pages including the recalls page remain live at the original domain. If you are looking for the recall page, go directly to Ninjakitchen.com/recalls rather than assuming the redirect will take you somewhere useful.

We also did not examine customer complaint records, reliability data or independent product testing, so nothing here speaks to whether these appliances last or perform well day to day. Treat those as unexamined rather than as endorsed.

Pros and Cons

How to Buy Sensibly

Check whether you already own a recalled unit before buying anything new. Read the model number off the label on the side, compare it to the twelve listed above, and check any spare lid you bought separately.

Register whatever you buy for recall notifications. This category has six air fryer recalls, fourteen blender recalls and a 4.8-million-unit portable blender recall in the same database. Registration is the only way you find out without reading review sites.

Buy it for the oil reduction, which is real and measured — and cook to golden rather than brown, because the acrylamide finding says extra time is not free.

Do not buy a multi-function pressure cooker if a simpler appliance does what you need. The pressure-cooking function is the one that failed here, and an appliance with fewer high-energy modes has fewer ways to hurt you.

Limitations of This Review

A note on method. Our general web search capability was exhausted before this review, so it was built from direct queries to the CPSC recall database and the PubMed literature database. That made the recall and research findings unusually well sourced — the recall figures come from the Commission’s own record rather than press coverage — but it means we did not examine complaint patterns, reliability data, independent product testing, pricing or warranty terms. Treat those as unexamined.

We have not used any Ninja appliance, so nothing here speaks to performance, build quality or durability. Recall information can change — remedies are updated and scopes occasionally expand — so check the official sources rather than relying on this page for the remedy.

On the research: both cooking studies are single studies with specific scopes. The oil-reduction work used a prototype air jet impingement oven on frozen potato products, which is not identical to a consumer air fryer. The acrylamide comparison was a reheating study on hash browns — not a general finding about cooking raw food, and one result rather than a body of evidence. We read abstracts rather than full papers, so we cannot speak to their methods in detail. The home cooking analysis is cross-sectional and shows association only. Nothing here is medical advice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Verdict

The recall has to come first, and it is not close. On 1 May 2025 SharkNinja recalled about 1,846,400 Ninja Foodi OP300 pressure cookers because the pressure-cooking lid can be opened during use, expelling hot contents. There were 106 reports of burn injuries, more than 50 of them second- or third-degree burns to the face or body, and 26 lawsuits.

The failure is of the interlock — the appliance’s primary safety system, the thing that makes it impossible to open a vessel still under pressure. That is why the burns are to the face rather than the feet. These sold from January 2019 to March 2025, for about $200, at Walmart, Costco, Sam’s Club, Amazon and Target — six years, ending two months before the recall. Check your model number against OP300, OP301, OP301A, OP302, OP302BRN, OP302HCN, OP302HAQ, OP302HW, OP302HB, OP305, OP305CO and OP350CO — and check any spare lid you bought separately.

In fairness, this is a category problem as well as a company one. The same database holds six air fryer recalls — including about two million COSORI units — all thermal, and a 4.8-million-unit portable blender recall. Switching brands is not automatically switching risk. And two recalls in roughly a decade at this sales volume is not remarkable; the 2025 one is remarkable for its severity, not its existence.

The health case for the products is genuine. A 2026 study found air frying significantly reduced oil content and absorption versus deep-fat frying while keeping acceptable texture — a calorie reduction delivered by the method rather than by willpower, which is the kind that lasts.

But we found the result that complicates it. A 2026 Food Chemistry comparison of four reheating methods for hash browns measured acrylamide at 351.77–443.94 μg/kg for air-based methods against 93.04–248.27 for oil-based — more acrylamide from air, not less — because air transfers heat less efficiently, so cooking takes longer, and longer cooking forms more. Their optimal method was pan frying at 160°C for three minutes. One study, one food, reheating only — but it means “air frying is healthier” is too coarse to be useful. Lower in fat, yes. Lower in everything, no. Cook to golden, not brown.

Buy for the oil reduction, register the appliance for recall notices, and check your existing Foodi today.