Juicer vs Food Processor

A food processor chops, slices, grates and purees. It has no mechanism for separating liquid from fiber, so it cannot make juice. A juicer has a screen and a pulp outlet, which is the whole point of it. These machines are not alternatives to each other.

Why a food processor cannot juice

A processor's blade spins in a bowl and reduces whatever is in there to smaller pieces. There is no screen, no pulp outlet and nowhere for fiber to go. What you get from processing a carrot is grated carrot, or carrot puree if you keep going.

A juicer has a perforated screen: liquid goes through it and fiber does not, then the fiber is ejected into a bin. That separation is the mechanism, and no amount of chopping replicates it.

You can process and then strain, which is the same workaround as blending and straining -- messy, slow, and only really effective on soft watery produce.

What "juice extractor" means

It is a marketing synonym for a juicer, and usually specifically for a centrifugal one. Hamilton Beach calls its 67601A a Big Mouth Juice Extractor; BLACK+DECKER calls the JE2200B a Juice Extractor. Both are centrifugal juicers.

Searching "juice extractor" and "juicer" returns largely the same machines. There is no separate extractor category to understand, and nobody is hiding a better technology behind the word.

What each machine is genuinely for

The overlap is narrower than it looks and it runs in one direction: some juicers do a handful of processor-ish jobs via attachments. A processor does no juicer jobs at all.

If you own a processor and want juice

Your realistic options are to buy a juicer, or to process and strain through a nut-milk bag. The second is viable for soft produce and genuinely poor for celery, kale and carrots -- the produce most people want juiced.

If a second appliance is the issue and versatility matters, an Omega horizontal is the closest thing to a dual-purpose machine on this site: Omega markets both the NC900HDC and the J8006HDS as nut butter, pasta and sorbet extruders alongside juicing. It still does not chop or slice. Horizontal masticating juicers covers them.

What a food processor is genuinely better at

Worth saying clearly, because a page that only lists what a machine cannot do is not much use. If you are choosing between buying one or the other, the processor does more different jobs by a wide margin:

• Chopping, slicing and grating at volume, which is the job it was designed for and the one a juicer cannot touch.
• Pastry, dough and pesto -- anything where you want controlled, uneven texture rather than a puree.
• Dips, hummus and nut butters, where a wide bowl and a blade beat a narrow auger.
• Breadcrumbs, pastry crumb and spice grinding.
• Prep for juicing, which is an underrated answer: if your juicer has a narrow chute, a processor's slicing disc gets a pile of produce ready much faster than a knife.

The one overlap worth knowing about

Several cold press juicers ship attachments that do processor-ish jobs, and the overlap runs entirely in that direction -- a juicer can do a few processor jobs; a processor does no juicer jobs at all.

Omega markets both the NC900HDC and the J8006HDS as nut butter, pasta, baby food, sorbet, coffee-and-spice-grinding and herb-mincing machines as well as juicers, with six nozzles supplied on the NC900HDC. Tribest's Slowstar includes a mincing attachment that replaces the juicing screen with a homogenizing one, for patés, nut butters and frozen fruit desserts. Dash's compact machine includes a frozen-dessert attachment.

None of them chops, slices or grates, so none replaces a processor outright. But if you were going to buy both and space is the constraint, an Omega horizontal or the Slowstar covers more ground than its category name suggests. Horizontal masticating juicers and the Slowstar review cover what each actually includes.

And the practical sequence if you own both: process to prep, juice to extract. A slicing disc turns five minutes of chopping into thirty seconds, which on a narrow-chute cold press machine is the single biggest time saving available to you.