How the Air Fryer Crisped Its Way Into America’s Heart

Major kitchen-appliance companies like Cosori, Ninja, Cuisinart and Instant Brands quickly introduced models of their own. They’ve added the air-fryer function to other appliances like convection and home ovens and pressure cookers.

When Ms. West, the co-creator of the Easy Air Fryer Recipes group on Facebook, set out to remodel her home kitchen in Shreveport, La., she decided that a stove with an air fryer was a must, even though she already owned five models of the air fryer.

“It’s a great device used by everyone,” she said of the air fryer. “All ages, all over the world.”

The first big sales boom for the air fryer came in 2017, and the pandemic provided another boost. Sales in the United States rose over the past year to slightly more than $1 billion — 20 percent more than in the year before, said Joe Derochowski, the vice president and home industry adviser at the NPD Group, a market research firm. In 2020, about 36 percent of American households had an air fryer, but Mr. Derochowski said that number would now be higher.

To understand the obsession many people have with the air fryer, it helps to look back to the mid-20th century, when food manufacturers learned that crispiness and crunch were among the textures consumers craved most, said Nadia Berenstein, a flavor historian. Those textures, which required a lot of heat and oil to achieve, had long been difficult to produce in a home kitchen for a weeknight meal.

Deep-frying was available to industrial food processors, Ms. Berenstein said. But now the air fryer is “on your counter, bringing home this kind of sensation that you had to rely on other people to produce.”

Americans buy more kitchen gadgets than people in the rest of the world, and that’s probably because advertisers promise it will change their lives, said Ruth Cowan, a retired history of science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of a book on household technology titled “More Work for Mother.” The kitchens of U.S. consumers also tend to have more counter and storage space.