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The artform known as the infomercial has been around almost as long as TV itself — the first one aired in 1949, for the Vitamix blender. If you watch the video, you can see that things haven’t changed much in nearly 80 years. It featured an older gentleman standing on a kitchen set, walking the viewer through making a smoothie, stopping for a long time to expound on the virtues of consuming more carrots, and it worked. Vitamix doesn’t really do infomercials anymore, but it does make some of the strongest blenders on the market.

Since then, informercials have made their mark on pop culture. The Flex Tape infomercial was turned into a meme, while the phrase “but wait, there’s more” was popularized by Ron Popeil, and used extensively in the Ronco’s infomercials. Over the decades, tons of products have come out with the “as seen on TV” moniker, and some of them have gone on to be long-standing products.

In terms of kitchen products that are “as seen on TV,” many of them are a total waste of money, but there are some diamonds in the rough, and some that created entirely new categories of kitchen tool. Vitamix is arguably the best example, but the brand doesn’t advertise in infomercials like it used to. Here are some other great “as seen on TV” kitchen appliances.

The humble Magic Bullet from NutriBullet has a simple premise. It’s a blender just big enough to mix a single serving of something, giving people the ability to make smoothies without the hassle of having to clean a whole blender. Just toss your ingredients into the cup, blend it, and then put a lid on it and drink it, leaving only the blender blade as the cleanup. The Magic Bullet launched in 2003 and was one of the first personal blenders on the market.

The brand has been wildly successful, with an estimated 60 million customers as of 2025. Even more impressive, it encouraged other blender makers to come out with similar products. For example, I own the Ninja Professional Plus blender that comes with two personal cups. My wife and I bought it so we could make milkshakes and smoothies in our own cups, which we do regularly. Vitamix also sells personal cups for its blenders as most other blender brands worth their salt.

In addition to being good for milkshakes and smoothies, the Magic Bullet is also good at making small servings of soups, sauces, and stuff like hummus, guacamole, and salsa. I’ve also seen people on YouTube use it as a spice and coffee grinder. In short, it works well as a blender and not just a smoothie maker.

One of the longest-running themes in kitchen informercials is how much people hate chopping vegetables. We’ve seen many ergonomic gadgets over the years try to solve this, from the Slap Chop to the classic Veg-O-Matic. One that did particularly well was the Presto Salad Shooter. Released in 1988, this little kitchen appliance shredded vegetables saw cooks feeding vegetables into the top of a chute connected to a rotating blade in the body that sliced the vegetables as the user pressed down. There was also a grater attachment that, according to people who used it, could shred a block of cheese in seconds.

The exact number of units sold is currently unknown, but the little shredder has nearly 10,000 reviews on Amazon, all of which came decades after the Salad Shooter’s heyday in the late 1980s and 1990s. Given the hundreds of stories of these things lasting decades, we can make a reasonable assumption that Presto has sold a metric ton of them.

The impressive feat for Presto is how unique it is. If you look around the salad chopper space, the overwhelming majority of products are still manual, so Presto stands as the most recognizable electronic chopper on the market nearly 30 years after its initial release.

The vacuum sealer has been around for decades, but FoodSaver’s infomercials, which started appearing in the 1990s, made a good case for people owning one in their home.The idea is simple: You place your food in bags and the vacuum sealer sucks all of the air out. This allows you to store it in the freezer without freezer burn for extended periods of time. Restaurants and commercial facilities use this technology all the time, and thanks to FoodSaver, it’s become more common in households as well.

Exact sales figures aren’t available, but FoodSaver has been making these things for over three decades. The product spawned a whole industry of in-home vacuum sealers, and it’s still on sale, along with replacement bags and accessories. The big thing is that the bags are washable and reusable, so you can buy a pack of them, and they’ll last you a while. Models also come with the ability to vacuum seal mason jars, letting you store things in glass as well.

This isn’t something I see every day like some other products, but if you look around enough, you can find them. Many prominent YouTube cooking channels use them to vacuum seal stuff prior to popping them into a sous vide bath. Others have used vacuum sealers to marinade food before cooking. You can also use them on non-food items to keep something dry or fresh for when you need it, like road flares.

Another one of Ron Popeil’s signature catchphrases was “set it and forget it,” which he often used when selling his Ronco Rotisserie Oven on late night TV. The contraption had a fairly unique design — it was functionally a small rotisserie oven you could keep on your countertop. You used the spits to hang meat, which would then rotate while the heating elements cooked it. Models also included a steam basket that sat on top of the oven that would steam your vegetables while you waited for the meat to cook.

Popeil sold a ton of products under his Ronco brand, including 2 million Chop-O-Matics. The exact number of rotisserie oven sales is unknown, but the brand has grossed more than $2 billion since it started in 1964, and the Ronco Rotisserie oven was a big part of that. You don’t see it quite as often as the George Foreman Grill, but loads of people across the internet still loudly adore the Ronco Rotisserie, even if some prefer to use it outside — it had a penchant for getting a little smokey from time to time.

While it didn’t create a whole industry of competitors, it is a shining example of how much people love tabletop cooking appliances. The Instant Pot and air fryer offer similar convenience, and both are often recommended as must-own appliances in the kitchen. Ron Popeil, a legend in the “as seen on TV” space, died in 2021 at the age of 86.

Love it or hate it, the George Foreman Grill was arguably the most successful “as seen on TV” kitchen appliance of all time. The gadget itself is little more than a slotted griddle cook surface with a lid that also has a slotted griddle cook surface, enabling it to both sides of your food simultaneously. The cook surface is also angled downward to allow fat to drain out into a catch tray. My parents owned one of these when I was a kid and we used it all the time. Some models came with a bun warmer on top of the lid.

This grill has reportedly sold over 100 million units, and the brand still sells it to this day. It launched right in the middle of a diet-crazed America in the 1990s, and the promise of reducing fat from popular food items like burgers made for an easy sell. It was sold by George Foreman, a world-renowned boxer and household name. If you haven’t seen the infomercials, they are quite compelling.

Ultimately, when people realized fat isn’t all that bad for you after all (as long as you don’t eat too much of it), the George Foreman Grill fad died off. However, people still use it for grilling, and often as a sandwich press. The brand now markets its products more as an indoor grill rather than a health food machine, but it does still drain grease.

Infomercials have been around for a long and there are a huge amount of “as seen on TV” products out there. Fortunately for us, the really popular stuff was easy to find. The Magic Bullet and George Foreman Grill especially were standout successes in their respective segments, while Ronco’s Rotisserie Oven and the Presto Salad Shooter had success drawn out over the long-term. It also helps that this list was for appliances, which means popular gadgets like the Slap Chop need not be considered.

From there, it was all about deciding what constituted as a success. For the most part, sales and revenue were the leading factors when deciding what to include. We also took into account public perception. All of the above products had overwhelmingly positive reviews from what we could find, with many stories available on social media from people who still use these gadgets today. We also took into account company health. All five products above are still sold today. Failures don’t generally tend to hang around for several decades. All products listed above are still sold today.

The only other part was determining if they were actually “as seen on TV” products. The Vitamix blender, for example, started life as an “as seen on TV” product, but hasn’t been marketed that way in a very long time, so it’s not really an “as seen on TV” product anymore. Similar products weren’t included here either.