I've been using this compact yet capable food processor for a year, and it's cut my meal prep time in half

I've been on a mission to make more meals from scratch, but it can be time-consuming to do all the chopping, slicing and grating by hand. So if you're also on a mission to make more wholesome meals, investing in one of the best food processors would be a wise decision.

The Sage / Breville Paradice 9 came out in 2024, and I've been using it religiously ever since. The Paradice 9 comes with an adjustable slicing blade, along with a reversible grating attachment and a dicing blade that's great for making fruit salads or breakfast potatoes.

There's also a dough and a chopping blade, and they're all stored inside the main bowl of the food processor, meaning you won't be looking for any extra storage space to keep all those add-ons.

This food processor has become an everyday staple in my house since its release last year. If, like me, your kitchen is short on space but you don't like to cut corners when meal prepping, this could be a great solution.

Price and availability

If you're reading in the U.S., this product is called the Breville Paradice 9. The brand operates in Europe under the name Sage, so it was Sage's U.K. office that sent me the Paradice 9 for review.

But the product itself is the same in both regions, and available for $399 or £299 at the brand's own website, as well as Amazon, and affiliates like John Lewis or Williams Sonoma.

There are three colorways to choose from. I tried the classic stainless steel color, but there's also a white and a black option.

Design

Most food processors that come with a range of attachments will include them in a separate container. And this includes the Paradice 9's big brother, the Paradice 16. These attachment boxes are great, but they take up a lot of space, which is at a premium in my kitchen.

So when I saw that the Paradice 9 houses all of its attachments inside its mixing bowl, I was super excited to try. It's a clever container system.

There's a clear plastic shell that has a slot for each and every add-on, from the grating disc to the dough, and it's not too tricky to figure out which attachments slot into the different grooves.

Speaking of attachments, let's run through everything that's included:

To start, there's an adjustable slicing attachment that can be increased and decreased using a dial on the handle.

There's also a dicing attachment which has 0.5 inch dicing cubes. Combined with its pusher and the feeding chute, you could easily put a large potato or a large fruit thorough this attachment. But just to warn you, the brand says you can't use sweet potatos with this attachment, which is a shame.

Other attachments include a dough blade, a chopping blade, and a grating disc which is reversible, meaning you get two grating options in one.

Performance

Making a dip

My Lebanese friend has told me off for calling this dip hummus, so let's instead call this recipe a 'butter bean dip'. Either way, it's very tasty and I make it all the time!

Although it's decidedly not a hummus, I use a similar recipe. I added a tin of butter beans (also known as lima beans), some olive oil, tahini, garlic, salt, pepper, cumin, and lemon juice into the bowl and blitzed for around a minute.

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I was pretty happy with the result. You can see in the finished photo that it was a little grainy, which might be down to the fact that I skimped on the olive oil, but I was happy to find that my mix hadn't stuck to the side of the bowl.

With other food processors, I've often had to go in and scrape down the side of the bowl multiple times to ensure that my ingredients were all incorporated, but I didn't have this problem with the Paradice 9.

Slicing and shredding

I meal prep a slaw most weeks. It keeps really well in the fridge, especially if I keep my dressing separate, but it can take a lot of labor when I use my mandoline to do it. Since I gave it a go in my Paradice 9, I've genuinely not used my mandoline since.

The 12cm / 4.5-inch feeding chute on this food processor can fit most veggies in without having to chop them first, and I've found that it will happily handle a quarter of a cabbage at a time.

The one caveat is that your need to lock the pusher into place in order to turn on the blending, which is probably a good thing, because you could definitely fit your hand into that chute and this step prevents you from accidentally turning on the food processor while adding ingredients.

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Once you've locked the pusher into place, the food processor will slice it in well under 10 seconds. I've made a huge bowl of slaw in under a minute using this setting, which has saved me so much time over the past year.

The same can be said for grating items like carrots or cheese. The good news is, you can use the removable insert from inside the pusher to fit in smaller ingredients such as carrots and cucumbers through the blades, and you don't need to lock your pusher into place to do this.

It also keeps your ingredients upright during slicing to prevent any wonky results.

Chopping cauliflower rice and blending breadcrumbs

I used to make cauliflower rice with a grater. It's one of the easiest and healthiest food swaps you can make, but if you're grating a cauliflower by hand, it's going to get messy.

After roughly breaking down my cauliflower, I put the entire head, stalk and all, into the bowl and started pulsing. After a few pulses, I had an evenly chopped bowl of cauliflower rice with no obviously large pieces, and no mushy mulch that had been over-processed.

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After the success of my rice, I decided to turn up the pressure and blitz some dried-out sourdough crusts into homemade breadcrumbs. This sourdough was absolutely rock-hard. I'd broken it into chunks before leaving it to dry out for breadcrumbs, so I added enough to fill my bowl halfway and pulsed to create my crumbs.

This would've been a challenge for any of the food processors I've tested, and it took longer than I'd expected to break down my bread into crumbs. By the end I had some dust at the bottom of the bowl but some very large chunks at the top, so I filtered out the smaller crumbs to continue to grind up my sourdough.

It took longer than I'd hoped to get the consistency I was looking for, but the end results was definitely worth it. And of all the food processors I've tested, there are very few I think could've managed this task.

Making a creamy sauce

I typically put wet sauce in one of the best blenders I've got at home, but seeing as I'd already made my slaw, I decided to make my dressing in the food processor too.

Using the chopping blade, I combined basil, yogurt, lemon juice, salt, pepper, pickled jalapeños and honey and blended for about 30 seconds.

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I think I'd have got a creamier consistency in a blender, but this still came out very smooth after just a short blitz, and saved me getting another appliance dirty!

There were no chunks of ingredients left un-blended, and I didn't need to scrape down the sides between blending.

Dicing potatoes

Finally, I was excited to test the dicing attachment. This is a feature that's usually reserved for more large and expensive appliances, so I really liked that Sage / Breville found a way to include it in this more compact design.

Fitting the attachment to the top of the bowl was a bit more finicky because it has two parts: a side that rotates to push sliced veggies through a second half-inch cubed blade.

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The whole experience went very smoothly, and I was able to make some delicious breakfast potatoes with my cubes. But the trouble started when it came to cleaning, and it's an issue I've had with every cubing attachment I've tried.

There is always a slice of potato or fruit that's left un-cubed at the top of the (sharp!) metal grid, and getting it out can be tricky and also a bit dangerous.

The brand does include a pusher you can lock on and press down to push your remaining ingredients through. In theory, this is a great idea, but it didn't work on every slice of potato I used and I still had to resort to using a wooden spoon to push the rest of my potato through into the bowl.

How does it compare?

The most obvious point of comparison for this food processor is its larger alternative, the Paradice 16, which we reviewed when it came out last year. It comes with all the same attachments as the Paradice 9 and then some. Alongside the dicing attachments, it also comes with a french fry attachment which we really enjoyed when testing. However, it's a more expensive and larger alternative that comes with two big boxes full of attachments.

Our top-rated food processor is the trusty Cuisinart 14-Cup, which has been one of the most popular models on the market for a long time. From dips to slices, it performed really well in all of the tests we threw at it, and it also costs $250, which is less than the Breville's $399. However, this option does require additional storage space for its attachments and doesn't have a dicing attachment.

Verdict

Among the best food processors, there are more budget-friendly options on the market, and it's also worth considering a mini chopper such as the KitchenAid 3.5 Cup if you're extra-restricted on space, but this food processor will be ideal for most households.

If I were looking for a new food processor, I'd highly consider purchasing the Paradice 9. It's powerful, capable, and storage-friendly. However, if the dicing attachment is the main appeal for you, be prepared to put in some extra work to clean it after use.