SharkNinja pulled back more than 1.8 million Foodi multi-cookers after reports of the lid failing to seal properly, letting hot contents spray out under pressure, an incident Consumer Reports covered as part of its ongoing recall tracking. It wasn’t an isolated case. Scroll through Consumer Reports’ own appliance-recall archive and one category keeps reappearing more than any other: electric pressure cookers and air fryers, the countertop gadgets that promised faster dinners and instead built up one of the most consistent defect patterns in the entire kitchen aisle.
The Same Failure, Different Brand, Different Year
Look past the individual headlines and the pattern is almost repetitive. Empower Brands recalled more than 300,000 Power XL dual-basket air fryers over a burn hazard tied to the unit overheating during normal use. Best Buy pulled its house-brand Insignia air fryers and air fryer ovens from shelves through the Consumer Product Safety Commission over fire, burn, and laceration risks. Cosori, one of the best-selling air fryer brands in the country, recalled roughly two million units after reports that an electrical component could overheat and ignite. Each incident gets its own press release and its own brand name attached, but the underlying defect keeps landing in the same place: a heating or pressure-release mechanism that fails under exactly the conditions the appliance is designed for.
Why This Category Keeps Getting Flagged
Air fryers and multi-cookers pack a heating element, a fan or pressurized chamber, and often a locking lid into a compact plastic housing that sells at a price point built for volume, not redundancy. When a seal, gasket, or thermal cutoff is even slightly out of spec on a production run of hundreds of thousands of units, the failure shows up at scale rather than as an isolated defect. Slow cookers and standard toasters carry their own recall history, but nothing in the small-appliance world has matched the frequency or the unit counts of pressure-based cooking gadgets over the past several years, based on Consumer Reports’ own recall coverage and the Consumer Product Safety Commission notices that accompany each one. The convenience that made these appliances a fixture on nearly every American counter, one-touch cooking under sealed heat and pressure, is the same mechanical setup that keeps producing the defect.
How to Actually Check Your Own Model
Every recall notice comes with a specific model number and a manufacturing date range, and it’s worth five minutes to look yours up rather than assume a recall couldn’t apply to your unit. The Consumer Product Safety Commission maintains a searchable database at cpsc.gov where you can enter the brand name directly, and Consumer Reports’ recall section aggregates the same notices with plainer explanations of the actual hazard. Check the bottom or back panel of your appliance for the model number, cross-reference it against the current list, and if there’s a match, stop using it immediately rather than waiting for a convenient time, since the injury reports behind these recalls involve burns severe enough to need medical treatment.
It also pays to actually read the specific hazard described rather than skimming the headline. Some recalls apply only to units made within a narrow production window, meaning two air fryers with the same model name sitting side by side in different households could have entirely different recall status depending on when each one rolled off the line. The remedy offered varies too: some brands issue a full refund, others send a free replacement basket, lid, or lock mechanism, and reading the actual notice rather than assuming the worst, or assuming nothing at all, saves a wasted trip or a needless toss into the trash.
What Buying Smarter Actually Looks Like
None of this means these appliances are inherently unsafe when they work as designed. It means the category has a documented, repeating failure mode that’s worth knowing about before your next purchase or before you keep running an older unit you already own. Registering a new appliance with the manufacturer, rather than skipping that step, is what actually gets you a recall notice by email instead of discovering it by accident months later. It takes about two minutes at checkout or right out of the box, and it’s the single easiest way to close the gap between when a defect is announced and when you actually find out about it.
The appliance itself isn’t the outlier here. The pattern of exactly how it fails, year after year, brand after brand, is the part worth paying attention to.
