The best mini fridge

By Tyler Wells Lynch

This post was done in partnership with The Sweethome, a buyer’s guide to the best homewares. When readers choose to buy The Sweethome’s independently chosen editorial picks, they may earn affiliate commissions that support their work. Read the full article here.

We spent 20 hours researching the most popular mini fridges, and we tested five of them by stuffing them with dozens of soda cans, measuring temperatures, and chilling drinks, lettuce, and frozen meals for a week. Most of them worked just fine—but if we had to recommend one, we’d say the Danby Designer DCR044A2 is the best of the bunch.

Who this is for

Mini fridges are great companions for small apartments, dorm rooms, hangouts, and offices. They’re ideal for storing drinks, snacks, daily lunches, and leftovers, but they can also store perishable items for a few days at a time.

However, mini fridges fall short of full-size, all-purpose refrigerators in several key ways. Most minis have no crisper drawer, so produce will lose its fresh taste and texture after a few days. Freezer burn is common, too, and the freezer compartments don’t reach anywhere near the 0 degree Fahrenheit threshold for safe, long-term meat storage.

How we picked and tested

We selected our finalists based on specs, price, and user ratings. Note to college students: Don’t stack them like this for the party. Photo: Liam McCabe

We put in roughly 20 hours of research and hands-on testing to make this guide’s recommendations. After setting up the picks and gathering initial impressions, we left a couple of our favorite models running, each with a head of lettuce and a frozen meal inside, for a week. After that test wrapped up, we kept using them to store drinks and snacks, gathering in total a couple of weeks’ worth of performance data prior to publication.

Although we’ve tested mini fridges before, we keep coming away with the same conclusion: All mini fridges work fine. That said, we set out to find the standout models, the ones with the best shelves and the best prices.

To start, we made a spreadsheet of the best-selling mini fridges at major retailers. We compared capacity, size, price, and other specs, and we tracked user ratings. We also made sure to consider only fridges that use compressors for cooling, as opposed to thermoelectric elements, which don’t get cold enough to keep food safe. People need to fit mini fridges in all kinds of spaces, so we broke the category down into two divisions based on size: cube mini fridges (which are smaller) and tall mini fridges (which have more shelving options).

After settling on five finalists—three tall models and two cube models—we bought them and started testing. First, we read their temperatures with a low-temperature digital thermometer for the fridge and freezer compartments. We evaluated each fridge’s storage capacity and compressor noise in addition to how well each fridge preserved food.

Our pick

With a lot of details similar to its competitors, the Danby stood out for its versatile storage. Photo: Liam McCabe

We like the Danby Designer DCR044A2 more than other mini fridges, mostly because it has better shelves and a smarter layout, including individual can holsters and a full-width freezer. That means you can store more food and drink more comfortably. Temperature performance is safe and as satisfactory as you’ll find in a mini fridge at this price. It takes up a similar amount of floor space as other models, and it’s relatively short for its size.

Designed with the best shelves and storage of any mini fridge we tested, this Danby model is advertised to have a capacity of 4.4 cubic feet, in the same range as competing models, but it uses its space better than the rest. We fit 89 12-ounce cans into the Danby DCR044A2 comfortably. The Danby DCR044A2 has other options that most mini fridges don’t, like an egg tray and a slide-out tray under the freezer. You can also raise or lower the individual shelves throughout the interior to adjust for items of different heights.

Individual can holsters, an egg tray, a full-width freezer, and adjustable shelves are the main features that set the Danby DCR044A2 apart from other mini fridges. Photo: Liam McCabe

And if you’re looking to store frozen goods, the freezer in the Danby is just as wide as the fridge itself, which is a big improvement on the smaller, partial-width freezers in many other models. Across our testing, it sat squarely within the FDA-recommended temperature range for refrigerators (35 to 38 degrees Fahrenheit). In the freezer, the usual resting temp was about 9.9 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s a bit of a problem for long-term storage, but it’s absolutely typical for the mini fridges we’ve tested, and fine for storing frozen meals for a few days at a time.

The Danby DCR044A2 has a full-width freezer, as well as a deli tray. You don’t see those on most mini fridges. Photo: Liam McCabe

Most of the Danby DCR044A2’s flaws can be chalked up to problems with mini fridges in general. Finding the right temperature setting can be tricky because the temperature dial has no markings. Freezer burn is inevitable if you leave anything in there for more than a few days. In any case, if you plan to store food that could make you sick if it spoils, you may want to buy a fridge thermometer (we got ours for $7) or to at least turn the dial down from the get-go.

A cube mini fridge

For a very small mini fridge, the cube-shaped Midea WHS-65L is cheap and surprisingly spacious, and it has a freezer. Photo: Liam McCabe

If we had a very small space to fit a mini fridge, we would buy the cube-shaped Midea WHS-65L. It’s cheap and surprisingly spacious despite its small footprint, it offers solid temperature performance, and it boasts a freezer compartment to boot.

It won’t take up much floor space, but the Midea WHS-65L cube fridge can hold plenty of drinks. Photo: Liam McCabe

Because of a cube fridge’s limited space (1.6 cubic feet) compared with tall mini fridges, such a model is probably not the best option if you plan to store more than one or two days’ worth of food for more than two people, but it really depends on your circumstances. For what it’s worth, in our tests we fit 46 12-ounce cans inside the Midea WHS-65L.

We recorded a fridge temperature of 37 degrees Fahrenheit after a half hour. That fell to 35 degrees after we turned the dial down, but either way, those are perfectly adequate temperatures for food storage. We recorded a wider temperature fluctuation in the freezer: 11 to 21 degrees, which fell to 10 to 20 degrees after we turned down the dial. That performance is about as good as you’ll get from a $100 fridge with a half-width freezer compartment. Just don’t depend on the freezer for long-term storage of frozen meals, and you’ll be fine.

This guide may have been updated by The Sweethome. To see the current recommendation, please go here.

Note from The Sweethome: When readers choose to buy our independently chosen editorial picks, we may earn affiliate commissions that support our work.