Commercial Salad Spinner 2.5 Gallon Capacity Salad Dryer to Remove Excess Water for Crisp & Fresh Sealed Gearbox Built-in Brake System with Durable Spinner Mechanism for Restaurants Kitchen & Catering

We have a small farmers market business selling produce during the summer months in Idaho. Recently, we visited a much larger operation near Bristow, Oklahoma and saw how they utilized a salad dryer to spin dry various vegetables and salad mixes. Upon returning home, we located such a spinner on Amazon and purchased it. This is a great salad dryer with a novel breaking action that reduces stress on the turning mechanism. Many people try to stop the spinner when done by using the spinner handle as a break. Doing this causes stress on the turning mechanism resulting it problems down the way. This model has a "button-like" mechanism along the top edge that one can push to slow or stop the spinning action. It works much like a brake on a bicycle. This spinner is fairly large so one can spin much more than just salad items. I've used it to dry beets, carrots, and radicchio. Will probably use it on broccoli and green beans when we start harvesting them later this year. One note, salad spinners are like any other spinning device and can get "off balance" so that it vibrates and shakes. I like to wedge it somewhere to help prevent it from "walking" off on me. They do make a stand that is suppose to help with this problem but I did not purchase it so can't comment on how it works. At the base of the dryer is a water exit port for drainage and the spinner comes with a short piece of tubing that you can attach to this port to drain the water into a bucket or some other place to catch the drain water. Made of plastic that appears to be of good quality and thickness, I expect to get many years of service from this salad dryer.

Over the years I have had a few salad spinners which stopped at my house on their way to the landfill. They didn't get the salad dry, were difficult to use and just plain useless. The cut greens are so dry that I can leave them out of the refrig overnight or even 24 hours later they are crisp as ever, crisper than what you get in pre-packaged cut greens in a container. The salads just taste better and are not full of a half-water, half-salad dressing mixture which after a short time in the bowl make the greens soggy and wilted. I really like my salads, and this has solved a major problem for me. (You CEOS at Whirlpool deserve a warm place in hell for what you have done to the products after purchasing Kitchen Aid, Maytag, etc. You are selling extended warranties, not appliances.My home is a revolving door for repairmen thanks to you.)In addition in these times of planned obsolescence, I am more and more deciding to upgrade to commercial. Commercial is made to have a long life span, pretty much last a lifetime. This is certainly true of this product. It is not a thin-walled flimsy contraption at all. I almost think I could stand on this thing and it would not collapse. And because of the gears the spinner inside goes round much more revolutions than you are turning the crank on the outside. It also spins almost effortlessly. It is so wonderful to find a product that is made like they used to make them when I was growing up. I'll be in a grave before this one's life is over. My final yard sale it will attend.

This is a first impression review. I will update it with continued use.If you have a restaurant that serves salads you need one of these. To tell you the truth, I kind of wish I would have bought the 2.5 gallon model as it is kind of large for my needs. The smaller model can 2 to 3 heads at a time. The darge model 5 to 6.It's a little unwieldy when spinning. A suction cup base should come with the thing, but it doesn't. You can find it elsewhere, but it's not worth $60.Amazon has three plastic 5 gallon spinners, the Chef-Master, Dynamic, and some generic green one. The Dynamic is around the same price as the Chef-Master when you include shipping, and it's made in France, probably a good thing. The Chef-Master is made in China. I assume the green one is made in China as well. There's not a lot of reviews of the green model which was cheaper ($102 with free shipping), but it's more expensive now from the current vendors. Both the Chef-Master and Dynamic got pretty positive reviews.I chose the Chef-Master for two reasons, it has a brake which sounds like a good idea, and Prime Shipping as I broke our small salad spinner, and needed a replacement sooner than later. After thinking about it, the brake isn't really necessary. It's nice, but the basket doesn't keep spinning very long when you take your hand off the handle. I do see my employees breaking this thing at some point brake or no brake. Hopefully, they'll use it.The lid doesn't snap on, it just kind of sits on top which I thought was interesting. I guess it doesn't need to. The gears don't sound very smooth, but I assume this is normal. The components seem robust enough. The basket turns six times for every one revolution and you aren't supposed to turn the handle faster than one revolution per second. A minute or two should be all it needs to dry lettuce off nicely. None of the components are dishwasher safe (kind of a surprise as the the bucket and basket would fit in my commercial dishwasher).It has a drain spout on the bottom and a small hose. I'm not sure of the diameter of the hose, but I plan to go to the hardware store and get a longer hose so it can drain into a bucket on the floor.I hope it holds up for me for a long time.Update 21 Jan 16: It's been rugged although we don't use it that often anymore. I should have bought the 2 1/2 gallon model. My wife hates the 5 gallon model because it's too cumbersome for her.