Food waste recycling is fundamentally a good thing. Our scraps and peelings make compost for growing more food, either at home or on an industrial scale, and the methane produced can be harnessed and converted into biogas. Without it, 437,000 tonnes of domestic food waste would be incinerated or dumped in landfill in the UK alone each year. 

But, no matter how good the intent, very few of us are going to tell you that dealing with bin juice, sloppy scraps, fruit flies and general gunk is top of their to-do list. The Sage FoodCycler, however, promises to transform your leftovers into dry, odour-free ‘EcoChips’ that take up to 80 per cent less space in the bin.

At roughly the size of a breadmaker (27.5 x 32 x 36cm), the FoodCycler is a simple machine. There’s one button, and once the pull-out pail has been filled with two litres of food waste, you simply lock the lid and press it. Between four and six hours later it will have dried and ground down the scraps – and, assuming you’ve not included some contraband such as apricot stones, big bones and thick rinds, you’ll be rewarded with an impressively small pile of dry brown mulch. The whole cycle – including cooling – takes around eight hours, so it’s definitely an appliance to run overnight.

Sage claims that two litres of scraps turns into 0.34 litres of chips, and in our month-long test this seemed there or thereabouts, but the before and after is undeniably impressive. The pail has a decent non-stick coating, although we did notice that wetter scraps could cause a build-up of gunk around the conductive points inside that needed scraping before cleaning. Mercifully it can be cleaned in the dishwasher though.

The capacity of the FoodCycler is a bit of an issue, however. Tested in a house with two adults and one child, there were almost always more scraps at the end of the day than space in the pail. As a result, we needed a second compost bin for the overflow, adding further to the kitchen clutter, which rather defeats the object.

At the back of the unit are two charcoal filters that do a fine job keeping odours to a minimum. They do however need replacing after every 500 hours (roughly 60 cycles) at a cost of £35 per pair. Once the cycle has worked its magic you can either chuck the scraps into your brown waste recycling bin, or you can add it to a compost pile and let the micro-organisms get to work and break it down into useful feed for the veg patch and plants.

But please don’t confuse these EcoChips with ready-to-use compost. Your food scraps have been dehydrated and chopped up, but at no stage have mesophilic microorganisms, thermophilic microbes, heat and time had a chance to work their magic. Good home compost takes weeks, even months, to create.

That doesn’t mean your scraps aren’t useful, though. Vitamix and Breville versions of this machine are already available in the US, and the dedicated FoodCycler website suggests that the chemical composition of the processed scraps has an average NPK (nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus ratio) of 4-1-1, which in layperson’s terms means if you mix it in with your soil it will enjoy a healthy boost. 

But be warned, Sage recommends you wait 90 days before using EcoChip-boosted soil if you’re growing food. Also, FoodCycler suggests a ratio of just 1:10, and that’s after you’ve let it ‘cure’ for between one and four weeks. So, in summary, you can make nature less icky, but you can’t hurry it up.

It’s worth noting though that Sage doesn't advertise the FoodCycler as a miracle cure for your lacklustre top soil. In fact, there’s scant mention of composting or soil feed on the website at all. Which sadly makes the FoodCycler one of the more niche innovations we’ve tested. 

Yes, it does the job of reducing the volume of food waste, which, if you’re one of the 13.4 million English households currently not having your kitchen scraps picked up separately, will help reduce the volume of food scraps destined for landfill… but that’s about it.

We asked Sage for details on energy consumption costs and we were told that "the average energy consumption for the FoodCycler is 0.8KwH per cycle, based on a five-hour cycle time. Based on an average power rate of £0.13/kWh and 0.8kWh per cycle four times per week this is approximately £22 per year." Add in a couple of pairs of filters each year and you’re looking at closer to £100.

If you do the simple math, it starts to make almost no sense at all. An initial outlay of £400, plus £100 a year in running costs for an eco machine that runs on grid electricity that doesn't make home compost just merely reduces your volume of food waste by cooking it down to mulch, which then takes just as long to use for compost as compost made in the usual way. Then, to top it all, the FoodCycler can't even cope with the daily food scrap output of a family with just one child.

All of which leaves us asking the obvious question of who is the FoodCycler actually for? At a wild guess, we'd have to say someone with significant disposable income to spare who wants to reduce the amount of food scraps they throw away, but also has a kitchen large enough for an extra appliance, but doesn’t have dedicated food-waste collections or a garden big enough for a compost bin. As we said, niche. Very niche. 

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK