Countertop ovens are great right up until you realize you’ve permanently surrendered a substantial portion of your kitchen to a stainless-steel box you use for twenty minutes a day.
The Ninja Flip Toaster Oven & Air Fryer SP151 has a remarkably obvious solution to this problem: when you’re done using the damn thing, you flip it up.
That’s it.
And somehow that turns out to be one of the best ideas anybody has had for a countertop appliance in years.
We recently bought the SP151 after watching multiple family members use Ninja’s Flip ovens for years. They’ve consistently raved about them, particularly because food comes out substantially crispier than it does from a conventional oven, they don’t have to heat a giant oven for a relatively small amount of food, and the entire appliance gets the hell out of the way when dinner is over.
After finally buying one ourselves, I get it.
The Flip Isn’t a Gimmick
This is probably the most important part of the entire review.
Most kitchens have plenty of appliances competing for counter space. Coffee maker. Toaster. Blender. Food processor. Stand mixer. Some inexplicable gadget your spouse bought six years ago that apparently cannot be thrown away because we might use it someday.
Then you add a countertop oven roughly the size of a Buick.
The Ninja’s solution is ridiculously simple. When you’re finished cooking, the entire oven rotates upward against the backsplash.
Ninja says this reduces its countertop footprint by 50% when flipped up. [sharkninja.com]
In real-world terms, it means something that provides legitimate cooking space for a small meal turns into something occupying roughly the kind of counter real estate you’d expect from a large toaster.
For a huge kitchen with forty feet of granite countertop, maybe you don’t care.
For everybody else, this feature is fantastic.
It’s Surprisingly Large When You Flip It Back Down
Here’s the clever part.
The SP151 looks relatively unobtrusive standing upright, but flip it down and suddenly you’ve got a legitimate little oven.
Ninja rates it for up to four pounds of food or a 12-inch pizza, and says it’s capable of preparing family-sized meals for up to four people. [sharkninja.com]
That’s right in the sweet spot for how we actually use an appliance like this.
You’re probably not cooking Thanksgiving dinner in it.
But dinner for two? Easy.
Dinner for three or four? Depending on what you’re making, absolutely.
Heating fries, chicken, pizza, leftovers, vegetables, frozen food or whatever other crap you’d normally fire up the full-sized oven to cook? That’s where something like this starts making an awful lot of sense.
And Yes, The Food Really Does Get Crispier
This was one of the things my siblings kept bringing up before we bought ours.
Food gets crispy.
Not “this is technically an air fryer so the marketing department says everything is crispy” crispy.
Actually crispy.
There’s a legitimate mechanical reason for that. Ninja’s OvenCrisp Technology combines infrared heating with rapidly circulating hot air around the food. [sharkninja.com]
That’s exactly the kind of cooking environment you want when you’re trying to brown and crisp the outside of something instead of slowly warming it into submission.
After getting ours, this was one of the immediate “oh, okay, now I understand why everybody likes these things” moments.
Turning On the Big Oven Starts Feeling Kind of Stupid
This is the other argument my family made for years, and it’s increasingly difficult to argue against after owning one.
A full-sized oven is fantastic when you actually need a full-sized oven.
If you’re cooking enough food to fill the thing, have at it.
But heating that enormous insulated box because you want some chicken and potatoes for two people starts feeling a little ridiculous when there’s a substantially smaller appliance sitting three feet away.
The SP151 is an 1,800-watt appliance, and Ninja designed it specifically around quickly cooking smaller family-sized meals rather than heating the volume of a conventional oven. [sharkninja.com]
Some retailers advertise the SP151 as 80% more energy efficient than a traditional full-sized oven. I wouldn’t translate that into “your electric bill will drop 80%” because that’s not what the claim means. Actual energy savings depend heavily on what you’re cooking, how long it runs and what kind of full-sized oven you’re comparing it against. [amazon.ca]
But the basic advantage makes perfect sense: don’t heat a giant oven when you only need a little one.
And in the summer, there’s another benefit that’s harder to put on an energy label: you’re not deliberately operating a giant heater in the middle of your kitchen and then asking the air conditioner to clean up the mess.
Eight Cooking Modes Means It Can Replace Some Crap
The SP151 has eight modes:
- Air Fry
- Roast
- Broil
- Bake
- Pizza
- Toast
- Bagel
- Dehydrate
Those are Ninja’s listed functions for the SP151. [sharkninja.com]
I’m normally skeptical when an appliance box starts shouting 8-IN-1! at me because half the time that means somebody discovered that changing the timer technically constitutes an entirely new appliance.
But here, several of those functions are genuinely useful because this thing can effectively take over jobs you’d otherwise assign to a toaster, toaster oven, air fryer or conventional oven.
That’s especially valuable if counter space is the whole reason you’re considering one in the first place.
What Comes With It
The SP151 includes an air-fry basket, sheet pan, wire rack and removable crumb tray. [sharkninja.com]
That’s enough to handle most of what people are likely buying this thing to do without immediately sending you back to Amazon for another fifty bucks worth of metal rectangles.
There is also something deeply satisfying about being able to pull out a crumb tray rather than eventually discovering an archaeological layer of toast fossils at the bottom of your appliance.
The Early Verdict
We’ve only recently bought our own SP151, so I’m not going to pretend this is a five-year durability test.
It isn’t.
But we didn’t buy it blind, either.
We’ve had siblings using Ninja Flip ovens for years who absolutely love them, and after finally getting one into our own kitchen, we’re already seeing exactly what they’ve been talking about.
The food gets crisp.
It handles the amount of food we actually cook most of the time.
We don’t have to fire up the big oven for every little meal.
And when we’re finished?
Flip.
Suddenly we have our counter back.
That’s what makes the Ninja Flip Toaster Oven & Air Fryer SP151 interesting. It isn’t merely another company trying to convince you that your kitchen desperately needs Appliance Number 37. [sharkninja.com]
It actually recognizes that Appliance Numbers 1 through 36 are already sitting on the goddamn counter.
Our Ownership Timeline
October 2026: Purchased the Ninja Flip SP151 after years of hearing positive reports from family members who own similar Ninja Flip ovens.
Initial impressions: Excellent crisping, noticeably more convenient than firing up the full-sized oven for smaller meals, genuinely useful cooking capacity for 2–4 people, and the flip-up design frees a surprising amount of counter space.
Future updates: We’ll come back periodically to report how it holds up, what we’ve learned, what starts annoying us, and whether we still think it was worth buying after the honeymoon period is over.
