Does 'Chop Champ' cut the mustard?

HOUSTON – We all know salads are good for us, but there's nothing fast about preparing them. Washing and cutting up all those vegetables takes time.

Consumer expert Amy Davis tested the Chop Champ, which promises to save you time in the kitchen. The commercial really does make salad prep look easy.

Davis tried to duplicate the results with the help of viewer Joel Reyna. 

"It is a lot of work," said Reyna. "You have to peel. You have to chop." 

Reyna says he makes salad two to three times a week. It's why the Chop Champ's promise to make the chore more efficient was enticing. Davis brought the veggies and the product. Reyna volunteered the labor. He just didn't realize it would be hard labor.

The Chop Champ commercial claims that you can just add all of your vegetables to a bowl that doubles as a strainer. Put the enclosed lid on the bowl and flip it over. You can then use a knife to slice through the guides on the bowl, slicing everything inside. The commercial says you can just pile all of your vegetables in the bowl to wash them before you get started, but Reyna worried just rinsing them wouldn't be adequate. 

"I, myself, normally scrub and wash vegetables thoroughly," he said.  

Once he washed everything, Reyna loaded the vegetables into the Chop Champ bowl, covered it with the top and flipped it over. He started slicing with the knife that came along with the set. 

"It's kind of hard, to be honest with you," Reyna said, as he struggled to get the plastic knife through the vegetables. 

He switched out the plastic knife for one of his regular kitchen butcher knives and ran it through the guides on the Chop Champ bowl four times. When he flipped the bowl back over and lifted the lid, it was as if he hadn't even tried to cut most of the vegetables. 

The flaw, however, was not in the product. Instead, operator error appears to have been the problem.

The white lid for the Chop Champ acts as a platform or cutting board when you flip the bowl. Reyna put the cover on the opposite way, making it impossible for his knife to reach the vegetables at the bottom of the bowl. 

Davis retested the Chop Champ at home and got much better results. When she chopped a salad, the Chop Champ did chop up most of the vegetables. The slices were not perfect; but they were definitely cut up.

When she sliced half of a personal size watermelon with the Chop Champ, the slices were perfectly even. 

"Seeing this, I would say it's not as big a fail as it seemed like it was," said Davis.

Some viewers who watched the retest on a Facebook Live video said the Chop Champ still seems like too much effort; but if you put in the work, it does chop everything up at once as advertised.

We paid $14.88 for the Chop Champ at Walmart.

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Editor's note: This story has been updated to show that the first test failed because of operator error.