Kiwi Knives: The Cheapest Knife You’ll Fall in Love With (A Review)

Kiwi knives are hugely popular throughout the world. There's something about the thin, light, affordable blades that people fall in love with. Whether it's the price, the performance, or the ease of sharpening, Kiwi might be the cheap kitchen knife you've been looking for all your life. 

Kiwi Knives at a Glance

Here are Kiwi's most popular knives and sets. Kiwi makes several other knives, as well.  See their whole lineup on Amazon. 

All Kiwi knives are made in Thailand and have a 1 year warranty. Prices are approximate and subject to change.

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About Kiwi

The Kiwi knife company was founded in 1978 in a village outside of Bangkok, Thailand by Supachai Chayakul, a blacksmith who made knives and machetes for local farmers and fisherman. By the 1990s, the company had several employees and continued to expand into a major manufacturer of mass produced knives. Today Kiwi knives are sold around the world. They are still made in Thailand.

Kiwi knives are so popular in the Far East, you're likely to find at least one of them in any Asian family kitchen. 

The Kiwi company also makes the Kom Kom brand, a slightly higher quality brand with some interesting specialty knives. 

Kiwis are not high-end knives, but they are beloved nevertheless for their thinness, lightness, and value. 

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Using Kiwi Knives (How We Tested)

For this review we tested the Thai 8-inch chef's knife (#21). The first thing we do is measure out-of-box sharpness (or in this case, out of bubble wrap) with a professional edge tester. We're looking for a sharpness below 400 grams, per this table of sharpness standards (the lower the number, the sharper the blade):

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the Kiwi Thai chef's knife #21 didn't produce great results on the Bess-C sharpness tester. The average of three tests was 410g ("edge in need of maintenance").

Even so, the blade was surprisingly sharp. It cut through tomato skin like a sharp, new knife. This is because Kiwi blades are extremely thin, so they feel and work like sharp knives even if they're not particularly sharp.

We do a more thorough review below, and even though it's for one knife, you can assume that all the Kiwi blades perform similarly. 

After sharpness testing, we put the knife to standard kitchen work, cutting tomatoes, onions, carrots, herbs, potatoes, apples, cheese, meats, and more. Because the blade is so thin, we stayed away from hard foods like bone, hard squashes, and frozen foods, and we recommend the same to all Kiwi users. The concern isn't chipping, as it is with hard Japanese knives, it is that the knife steel is too soft to cut through hard items without bending or rolling the blade. 

These knives are great at what they're good at, but they're not good at everything. 

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Features of Kiwi Knives

This section looks at important features of Kiwi knives.

Steel

Kiwi doesn't disclose what steel they use on their knives, they just say it's "Japanese knife steel." There are a lot of different Japanese knife steels, but some experts think Kiwi knives are 2Cr13 steel, which has a carbon content of about 0.2%, which is low for knives. (Compare to Wusthof steel, which has a carbon content of 0.5%.)

The low carbon content means the Kiwi knives are soft, with a hardness rating on the Rockwell scale of 50-51 HRC. This is lower than we typically recommend for kitchen knives, as anything lower than about 55 HRC needs to be sharpened frequently. However, Kiwis are an exception for two reasons.

First, Kiwis are so cheap that you don't expect great sharpness, much less longevity--and they are easy to sharpen (more on this below). 

Second, the blades are so thin that even when they're dull they can cut through food easily. Dull Kiwis work almost as well as sharp Kiwis (not really, but you'll be pleasantly surprised at how sharp a Kiwi knife feels even when it isn't).

Handles