Vitesy Shelfy review: gives your fridge the feelgood factor

T3's Vitesy Shelfy review in a sentence: Works like an air purifier for your fridge and helps keep foodstuffs fresher for longer.

Refrigerators can be such depressing places. Even if you’re lucky enough to own the best fridge or one of the best fridge freezers, we tend to take them so much for granted that they can often turn into dumping grounds for the likes of unloved fruit, veg and dairy produce. The Vitesy Shelfy, made in Italy no less and where food is quite rightly worshipped, aims to help get our fridges back on the straight and narrow. No easy feat in my house.

There are other folks in my household who think it’s perfectly reasonable to leave foodstuffs in the fridge for very long periods of time. Nothing wrong with that, just as long as there is some edible aspect to them. However, it’s not unusual for some items to remain in our fridge long after their sell by date has rolled by. This results in smells and, frequently, residue from decomposing things like near fossilised fruit to leak on to shelves. It’s not a pretty sight.

Enter then the Vitesy Shelfy. I guess this falls into smart home gadget territory and is the first thing I’ve tried that might offer salvation for our refrigerator. It’s a bit like an air purifier but for your fridge, and can be placed inside and left to do its own thing while offering you updates on progress via the Vitesy Shelfy app.

As I know from trying some of the best air purifiers, these appliances really do work and so there’s no reason why a condensed version of the same thing isn’t going to come to the aid of my occasionally unsavoury refrigerator. Here's how I’ve been getting on…

Vitesy Shelfy review: price and availability

T3 first covered the unveiling of the Vitesy Shelfy well over a year ago now. Back then, it had a retail price of £129, but can frequently be found discounted to just under £100, which makes it even more worth considering in the UK.

Meanwhile, for the US, the Vitesy Shelfy is available now and has a retail price of $179.99 but can be found on offer for $149.99 by shopping around online. I’ve already seen it for just $125.99 on Amazon, which represents a 30 per cent saving on the official asking price. There are actually a whole host of other similar products in this area, with some as cheap as $25, which makes the Vitesy Shelfy look and feel like a premium product.

Vitesy Shelfy review: is it any good?

Smart home gadgets are many and varied, from the best smart thermostats through to the best smart speakers and they’re all worth a look. The Vitesy Shelfy certainly looks like another gadget to try out, especially if you can get it with some money off. The core point of the Shelfy is to help lift the quality of the air in your refrigerator and, at the same time, help prolong the life of foodstuffs contained inside.

Vitesy’s own figures suggests the Shelfy can help reduce food wastage, with up to 12 days extra shelf life promised for many things inside the fridge. The technology slows down the process of degradation, so fruit and vegetables should last that little bit longer. Equally, if something in your fridge isn’t fully ripened then the Shelfy can help to slow up that process too, which also means that items should retain their usability for a while longer.

What I like about it, alongside the efficiency and health benefits, is the way the Shelfy is relatively low maintenance. There’s nothing worse than adding a new gadget to your arsenal of smart home appliances, only to find that it needs to be continually checked over. The Vitesy Shelfy is basically placed inside your refrigerator and can sit there for up to three weeks, only needing the occasional charge using a supplied USB-C connector cable.

Vitesy Shelfy review: performance

Once out of the box, it took me a while to get the Vitesy Shelfy up and running. Switching it on is done by pushing the button on the front. Ideally, it’ll need a charge first too, using the supplied USB-C cable. Vitesy recommends washing the removable filter first as well. All that was fine. However, after downloading the app I had quite a lot of trouble getting the Shelfy to connect to my phone via Bluetooth. I’m still not sure why but I initially kept getting an error come up within the app.

After everything had fallen into place though, the Shelfy is easy to use. I’ve placed it in a couple of locations in the fridge and, thankfully, it’s not too big with dimensions of 6.05 x 11.4 x 16.54cm. That might prove problematical if you regularly have a well stuffed fridge though. It weighs just 730 grams too, while the operating sound is just 30dB so I could barely notice it was on against the backdrop of the fridge compressor itself. I rather like the clean ivory-coloured plastic of the construction too, which means the Shelfy will sit happily a fridge shelf and be barely noticeable to most who dip in.

A great aspect of this unit and the software is the way it can give you updates on fridge wellbeing. Shelfy will let you know if your fridge could do with being colder, plus there’s also an occasional prod about how good folks are at closing the door efficiently. On top of that, Shelfy really does seem to be good at minimising odours, although the filter does need to be cleaned regularly to keep that performance level up.

As for keeping food fresher, it is still fairly early days but I’ve noticed that salad stuff seems to be faring better than normal, especially lettuce and cucumbers, which can often tend to start looking a bit sad. Even more so because we often keep them for a lot longer than most. I’m a bit of a cheapskate, so anything that can help prolong the life of veg and reduce wastage seems like a good idea to me. It’ll take a while to recoup the initial investment for the gadget, mind.

Vitesy Shelfy review: verdict

The Vitesy Shelfy is a neat idea and, certainly for my household, makes a lot of sense when it comes to improving conditions inside our fridge. I’m not entirely sure I like the price of this smart home gadget though because even when it’s discounted it’s not exactly cheap. That might be enough to persuade lots of potential customers to simply bypass it and put up with the unpleasantness of their refrigerators. However, the Vitesy Shelfy does seem to work quite well, although I’ll need to spend a little more time living with it to decide for sure.