Ninja has a brand new air fryer and those with smaller kitchens will want to know all about it

(Image credit: Ninja)

Jump to category:

New small Ninja air fryer

published 8 December 2023

Air fryers come in all kinds of sizes, but up until now, there was only one air fryer from Ideal Home's favourite small appliance brand Ninja that was a good fit for compact kitchens.

Now, thanks to this brand new release, the Ninja Air Fryer MAX PRO 6.2L AF180UK, you'll be able to make Christmas dinner a whole lot easier in your smaller kitchen. And as every Ninja air fryer we've ever tested has easily made it in to our rankings of the best air fryers, we're fairly confident that this is going to be a hit performance-wise too.

I was invited to Ninja's new office in Frankfurt to see Ninja's brand new releases, which means that I got an exclusive first look at this air fryer too. Here's what I learned when I saw it in action.

New small Ninja air fryer

You can buy Ninja's new air fryer from the Ninja website and be one of the first to try it out.

The first impressions I had with this air fryer is that the design marks a new direction for Ninja, with a kind of polished finish that we also saw with the relatively new FlexDrawer (which you can read more about in our Ninja FlexDrawer Air Fryer review).

While the FlexDrawer is so large that it can put to bed any questions of an air fryer vs an oven when it comes to size, and has the flexibility to be used as a single or double drawer appliance at any time, this new Ninja AF180UK is targeting a different type of kitchen.

This air fryer will be for you if space is already in demand on your worktop but you still want to capitalise on the space you have. Though it's shorter than Ninja's only other small air fryer, which we tried out a few years ago in our Ninja AF100UK Air Fryer review, it has a much larger capacity – 6.2 litres compared to 3.8 litres.

There are also two more functions (bake and Max Crisp) packed into the Ninja AF180UK compared to the AF100UK, though these two air fryers have the same RRP (£149.99). That means you get more functionality and space for your money.

If you don't have space for one of the best dual zone air fryers, then we think this new Ninja release might be the perfect compromise between saving space and maxing out on cooking capacity. We're racing to test it out as soon as possible, to let you know exactly how it measures performance-wise too.

Molly is Ideal Home’s Kitchen Appliances Editor and an all-around baking and cooking enthusiast. She joined the team in September 2022 as an Ecommerce Editor after working across Real Homes, Homes & Gardens and Livingetc. She's been reviewing products for 4 years and now specialises in weighing up kitchen essentials' pros and cons, from air fryers to bean-to-cup coffee machines.

She's always been a keen reader, so after graduating from the University of Exeter in 2020 she was thrilled to find a way to write as a full-time job. Nowadays, she spends her days at home or the Ideal Home test facility trying out new kitchen innovations to see if they’re worth a space on your worktop. Her most beloved and hard-working appliance is her Sage coffee machine though she also takes the title of Ideal Home’s in-house air fryer expert after writing about them religiously over the past few years.

When she's not thinking or writing about kitchen appliances, she loves getting around London exploring new places, going for a dip at the Ladies’ Pond and consuming every bit of pop culture she can get her hands on.