Dreamfarm Fluicer Review: What Makes It Better Than Your Juicer

There’s more than one way to juice a lemon. Is that how the old saying goes? And if you’ve been stuck in the staid world of the citrus reamer and citrus squeezer, you’ve been missing out on a great one.

The Fluicer—a portmanteau of flat and juicer—turns the citrus squeezer on its head, or, rather, on its side. Instead of using the often splatter-inducing downward force we’re all used to, the Fluicer takes advantage of horizontal leverage.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Opening the two symmetrical handles of the Fluicer fully creates a pyramid-shaped void for a halved lemon. When you press the handles closed, the pyramid face toward the cut side of the lemon presses inward, while the outer two sides, patterned with little plastic teeth to grip the rind, press from either side. Essentially, the mechanism lets you provide even pressure from all sides.

It’s a nice theory, but to see how it worked in practice I used the Fluicer alongside a standard squeezer and a seed-catching reamer I picked up for a marathon lemon curd making session. I used lemons of equal weight and juiced them individually into a measuring cup. I also noted the time and effort required.

When it came to the volume of juice, all three tools managed to squeeze out just over two ounces per lemon. So this ended up being a battle over which tool required the least effort from me.

The reamer, of course, required both pushing and twisting and took the longest time to completely clean out the lemon, about 15 seconds of work for each half. The citrus squeezer was more effective, though I had to squeeze the lemon halves several times to fully get the same amount of juice out. The Fluicer, as promised, completely crushed its lemon halves, releasing all the juice in one squeeze.

Angled channels on the Fluicer funneled juice into the cup while catching the seeds that inevitably escaped the lemon. And while a particularly hard squeeze created some spray, any spillage from the Fluicer was less up-and-out the way it is with a traditional squeezer and more over-and-down right back into the measuring cup. It was easy to get a feel for the correct pressure after just a few reps.

One other nice feature of the Fluicer, which also comes in smaller “lime” and larger “orange” versions, is that it lies flat in the drawer when you’re done. If you’ve been using a standard squeezer, switching to a fluicer will open some up drawer space immediately. You could even slip this comfortably into the side of a silverware drawer in a pinch.

Though it’s made of a dishwasher-safe plastic, the Fluicer still feels extremely durable. The handles are weighty and the hinges feel solid. It does take up a fair amount of space in the dishwasher (nearly the length of the top rack in an open position), but that was still an easier way to clean it than wiggling into the nooks and crannies with a dish brush.

Following my head-to-head tests, I went full Fluicer and used it to batch out a mason jar full of lemon juice from the remaining bag of lemons for some lemonade. The process was a breeze, with no second-guessing whether I had properly pulverized every last bit of pulp. It is definitely one of those kitchen tools that makes a simple job faster and easier—qualities you might not appreciate until you run across a recipe that requires multiple cups of freshly squeezed lemon juice and your carpal tunnel starts flaring up halfway through.