This quirky kitchen gadget is already a kitchen essential - it's genius

BORA QVac Move Sealing Set: at shop.bora.com

You're about to find out why the QVac is my top pick when it comes to vacuum sealing your food at home. This will keep everything from bread and avocados through to soups and salads fresher for longer - and the best way to buy it is in the set, which comes with sealing bags, boxes, and stoppers.

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Vacuum sealers aren’t exactly the kind of appliance you daydream about for your kitchen. They don’t shimmer on your worktop like a stand mixer, nor do they promise the instant gratification of an air fryer. But stay with me, because this quietly brilliant gadget could save you up to £500 a year while extending the life of everything from crusty sourdough to half-used avocados by as much as 25 days. Imagine squeezing out an extra three and a half weeks from your herbs, berries, and hummus. Now, that's the stuff we can start daydreaming about.

When it comes to vacuum sealers, context is everything. At one end of the spectrum sit the petite bottle sealers: neat, drawer-friendly little tools that you can toss into your shopping basket without a second thought. At the other end are the more sophisticated systems that are small space storage essentials. They're designed to preserve and organise everything in your fridge and larder. After extensive testing, I’ve become particularly attached to the Bora QVac Vacuum Sealer, a model that has earned permanent residence in my collection of kitchen tools.

Since bringing one home, I’ve vacuum sealed everything from weekday lunches to entire loaves of bread, and the results have been quietly transformative. Less waste, fewer emergency supermarket trips, and a fridge that suddenly feels far more organised, almost smugly so. And that culminates in the BORA QVac earning its place as my favourite home tech gadget of the year - and we're only in February.

Who would a vacuum sealer suit?

In my view, a vacuum sealer is less a luxury and more a modern kitchen essential. The right one for you will pay you back almost immediately. Choosing yours simply depends on how you cook and shop:

What is a vacuum sealer and why I swear by them

It's highly likely that you have a vacuum sealer for your wine already, because every drop counts. You might have even bought the gadget for jam jars too, but the one that I think is seriously special is the BORA QVac Vacuum Sealer.

In the UK, households waste nearly £500 on food every year. It’s a shocking figure (and one I’d much rather see in my bank account) but it’s easy to understand why. How often have you opened the bread bin to find stale or mouldy slices? Unscrewed a pesto jar only to spot fuzz inside? Or binned an avocado that’s gone past brown? It all adds up.

The BORA QVac has been cleverly designed to extend the life of every type of food. Solid items can be sealed in a plastic bag and stored in the fridge or freezer, while more delicate foods and liquids fit neatly into the tubs and bottles. I’ve tested everything from crisps and salads to avocados and cakes, but my most exciting discovery was soup. After vacuum-sealing it in a container, not unlike classic Tupperware, I carried it around in my handbag without a single leak. The seal keeps the lid secure, the soup contained, and my handbag pristine.

There's also a special function on the BORA QVac that lets you marinade ingredients. If you've ever read a recipe and come to the point where it says "leave to marinade overnight", you probably just pressed on with the recipe. The beauty of the QVac is that it can emulate the overnight soak in 15 minutes. I've tried it on tempeh and on fish and I can tell you now, it works. Let's take a look at the proof.

My experience with the BORA QVac Vacuum Sealer

What surprised me most during testing the BORA QVac Vacuum Sealer wasn’t just how well it worked, it was how quickly it changed my kitchen habits.

Everyday sealing: bread and cheese

Bread that would normally tip into staleness within days stayed springy and aromatic for over a week. Cheese held its structure beautifully without sweating inside the packet, and that telltale “fridge smell” simply never developed.

The bread needs to sit in the storage tubs, because it falls into the 'soft' category that would be totally flattened in the vacuum storage bags. I could fit 8 slices of my signature sourdough in the tub and saw some pretty dramatic results. Fresh bread, especially in my house, needs to be eaten on the day. Just one night can give it a dry edge, but we restrained ourselves, vacuum sealed these slices and came back to enjoy them one week and two weeks after sealing. It did get a little drier and more suitable for toast, but wasn't mouldy at all.

The cheese definitely needed a bag, both from a space and practicality perspective. It only takes a couple of seconds to seal in the bag and, for what is quite an aromatic cheese, I didn't notice any smell in the fridge. It didn't dry, was easy to unseal and enjoy, as with the bread for weeks.

Wet sealing: marinades, soup, and avocado

This is where the technology really flexes. By removing air, marinades are effectively pressed into proteins, accelerating flavour absorption in a way that usually takes hours, or even an overnight marinade.

I'm very forgetful when it comes to marinading tempeh, so I wanted to see whether I could replicate my usual overnight results in 15 minutes. With no more than 23 dB of noise and not a second over 15 minutes, the tempeh was wonderfully coated in my sweet chilli marinade. Cooking with it, I could see the flavour was deep and rich into the structure of the tempeh. Since then, it has been a preparation Godsend.

Soup stored without oxygen tasted noticeably fresher when reheated, rather than slightly tired. I was able to vacuum seal 500ml my butternut squash soup into the smaller tub that BORA sends. The seal is so solid that I could carry it to work in my bag without worrying that the lid would unstick.

Even a cut avocado, famously fleeting, avoided browning far longer than I thought possible. In a side-by-side test, my avocado lasted 25 days before I felt it really needed to be used. For context, avocados in my fridge normally need eating within 3-4 days.

Fragile foods: crisps and berries

Using a gentle pressure setting prevented delicate items from being crushed. Berries remained plump rather than collapsing into jammy sadness as the days passed by. These berries have been in my fridge for 9 days and yet they look like they were bought the day before. It's like magic.

One of the BORA team inspired me to run tests on crisps, as he mentioned that he vacuum seals them in a box when he's travelling. Mine kept their audible crunch when I carried them around in my handbag for the day and were well protected.

Container sealing: salads and leftovers

Vacuum-sealed boxes turned leftover pasta and leafy salads into tomorrow’s lunch rather than tomorrow’s guilt. The hold was impressively consistent, and many containers are reusable, a small but satisfying sustainability win.

Liquids: oils and smoothies

My first time using the QVac was with BORA's team and they were keen to share the oil infusion trick. As with the marinades, you can add infusions to your oil and speed up the process by which they flavour the oil in using the vacuum sealer. As someone who can't eat garlic, but can have garlic-infused foods (hello, low FODMAP friends), I was able to cook with much more ease. Rather than wait week for a hint of garlic flavour, I had mine in a matter of minutes. Then, I could seal up the bottle: no leaks, no seepage, no mysterious fridge puddles. Enough said.

I’ve had more than a few raised eyebrows when confessing my affection for a vacuum sealer, but I would wager good money that once you own one, you’ll wonder how your kitchen ever functioned without it.

Vacuum sealing interrupts that cycle of waste that's costing us all financially as well as mentally (I feel guilty every time my food runs out of life in the fridge). With a vacuum sealer like the BORA QVac, ingredients last longer, flavours stay brighter, and suddenly cooking ahead feels like a gift to your future self rather than an obligation.

What began as a tentative experiment with a modest gadget has genuinely reshaped the rhythm of my kitchen. I shop differently, waste less, and cook with a little more freedom and consider it my editorial duty to tell you: this is one appliance that earns its space many times over. I think I'm ready to dish up some kitchen organisation tips.