Where the air fryer came from

Questions this answers

• Who invented the air fryer?
• When was the air fryer invented?
• Was the Philips Airfryer really the first one?
• Why is it called a fryer when it does not fry?
• Why did air fryers suddenly become popular?

The principle is a century old

An air fryer is a small convection oven. Nothing about moving hot air over food with a fan was new in 2010, and the appliance's history properly begins with the fan-assisted oven rather than with any product carrying the word fryer on the box.

A fan-assisted oven was patented in 1914 and never reached the market. The first one in wide use was the Maxson Whirlwind Oven of 1945, and fan ovens spread through commercial kitchens for decades before they became ordinary in domestic ones — the 1980s, in most of Europe. By the time the air fryer arrived, the mechanism it uses was in tens of millions of kitchens already.

There was also a generation of compact convection appliances in between, and they are the air fryer's direct ancestors rather than its distant ones. Halogen ovens — a glass bowl, a halogen lamp for the heat, a fan on top — sold widely from the 1990s and do the same thing an air fryer does, with the heat produced a different way. Anyone who owned one recognised the air fryer immediately.

The first one to market was French, and it worked differently

Groupe SEB launched the Actifry in France in 2006, four years before the Philips machine, and it is recorded as the first hot-air fryer to reach the market by both the English and the French encyclopaedia entries — two editorially independent communities, one of them in the country it launched in.

It is worth knowing that it is a genuinely different machine. An Actifry is a shallow heated pan with a fan above it and a paddle that stirs the food continuously through about a tablespoon of oil. A modern air fryer holds food still in a basket and moves air past it fast. The Actifry solves the same problem — chips without a litre of oil — with a mechanism closer to stir-frying than to convection roasting, and it is much better at wet dishes and much worse at anything you do not want stirred.

So the honest sentence is not that Philips copied SEB. It is that two companies arrived at the same problem within a few years and solved it differently, and the design that won was not the one that got there first.

What the patent actually says

The popular story credits a Dutch engineer, Fred van der Weij, who is variously said to have invented the air fryer in 2002, 2005 or 2006 depending on which article you read. Dates that vary by four years across otherwise confident retellings are a sign that nobody is reading a document.

There is a document. US patent 8,299,404 B2, 'Apparatus for preparing food and air guide member therefor', carries a priority date of 16 June 2006, was filed in December 2008 and granted in October 2012. Its inventor is printed as Fedde van der Weij. Its original assignee is not Philips but Kavaring Cooking Systems BV, and the assignment recorded against it today is to Versuni Holding BV, which is what the Philips domestic appliance business became.

The apparatus it describes is recognisably the first Airfryer: a double-walled chamber with an air-permeable bottom, heat radiating down from elements above, hot air driven upward through the food from below, and an air guide beneath the chamber — radial ribs meeting at a point — shaping that upward flow so the air speed is similar wherever the food happens to be sitting. That last part is the actual invention. The idea of blowing hot air at food was not new; making the airflow even across a small chamber, so one chip is not cooked twice as fast as its neighbour, is the engineering problem, and it is the same problem every machine in this catalogue is still solving.

A patent is evidence of what was claimed and when. It is not evidence that anything was built, sold or worked well, and AirfryerHQ makes no assertion about its scope or validity.

2010: the launch, and what was claimed at it

Philips showed the Airfryer at the IFA electronics fair in Berlin on 3 September 2010, branding the technology 'Rapid Air'. The trade report filed that day records the claims made: 80 per cent less fat than oil frying, a maximum temperature of 200°C, and a 75 per cent approval rate in blind taste tests.

Those are manufacturer claims relayed by a journalist at a trade show, and AirfryerHQ records them as claims rather than as findings. The 80 per cent figure in particular is a comparison against deep frying, not against an oven, and it has been repeated ever since without the comparison attached — which is how a marketing statement becomes a fact about air fryers in general. What can be said responsibly about fat and health is a separate page.

It took another decade for anyone to buy one

The part the anniversary pieces leave out is that almost nothing happened for years. The Actifry did not sell in volume. The Airfryer was a curiosity. Both language encyclopaedias record the same thing: wide domestic adoption arrived in the 2020s, in Britain, the United States, Brazil and South Korea, fifteen years after the category existed.

Why then is a question about electricity prices, small households, social video and a pandemic that put a great many people in their own kitchens at once, and AirfryerHQ has no evidence that would let it rank those causes. What it can say is that the appliance did not succeed because it was invented. It succeeded when the reasons to want one changed.

How the design changed once people were buying

The visible history since is a story about drawers. The original machines were a single basket, and the single basket's limitation is immediate: everything in it cooks at the same temperature for the same time, so a family meal becomes a sequence of batches.

Dual-zone machines answered that with two independent drawers, each with its own element and fan, plus a synchronise function that starts the shorter cook late so both finish together. Flex-drawer designs answered it differently — one large space with a removable divider, so you trade independence for the ability to cook one big thing. Both are in this catalogue as architectures rather than as brands, because the difference is real and the badge is not.

The other half of the story is that air frying stopped being a product and became a MODE. Built-in ovens, countertop ovens, combination microwaves and multicookers now advertise an air-fry setting, and what that setting means varies from a genuinely capable high-airflow programme to a fan and a hot element with a new label on it. AirfryerHQ assesses that by architecture and airflow rather than by what the control panel claims, which is why an appliance nobody has heard of can still get a useful answer here.

Why it is called a fryer

It does not fry. Frying is cooking in hot fat, and the fat is what carries heat into the food; an air fryer has no bath of oil and cannot do that. The name describes the RESULT it was sold as a substitute for, not the method it uses.

'Airfryer' began as a Philips product name. It became the ordinary English word for the whole category, which is what happens to a strong brand name in a category with no existing word — and it now sits on boxes from every manufacturer. AirfryerHQ uses 'air fryer' as the generic term for the appliance class throughout, because that is what readers type, and takes no position on any trade mark.

What AirfryerHQ has not established

The chronology above rests on a granted patent, one contemporaneous launch report and two encyclopaedia articles. That is enough to fix dates and to correct the two errors in the received account; it is not a business history. AirfryerHQ has not read SEB's own account of the Actifry's development, has not seen the Kavaring–Philips assignment documents, and has not established whether Fedde and Fred van der Weij are the same person or two spellings of one name — the patent prints one and the press prints the other, and that is all we can say from what we have read.

The adoption figures quoted in the sources are market-research numbers we have not gone behind, so they are used here to say 'adoption came late' and not as figures.

Evidence and confidence

Cooking pages this relates to

• Frozen chips

Appliances

• Basket air fryer
• Dual-basket air fryer
• Flex-drawer air fryer
• Built-in oven with an air-fry mode