CES 2026: This knife secretly vibrates when you cut with it

I spent part of my Sunday night at CES 2026 chopping vegetables on the showroom floor of the Unveiled media event. But this wasn't your average cooking demo: My knife vibrated whenever I cut into a tomato.

This might sound like some sort of twisted Cutthroat Kitchen challenge, but trust me — it's more practical than it sounds. Launching this month from the cutlery startup Seattle Ultrasonics, the C-200 UltraSonic Chef's Knife has an orange button on its handle that makes its eight-inch Japanese steel blade vibrate about 30,000 times per second. This allows it to slice through food more smoothly than a regular knife, as well as prevents crumbs from clinging to the blade. It also shouldn't need to be sharpened as frequently.

Impressively, the C-200 only wiggles a distance of 10 to 20 microns when it vibrates — a quarter of the width of a grain of salt, per a PR rep — so you don't see or feel it move at all. It looks and handles like a standard chef's knife, albeit one on the heftier side. The only reason I'm confident that Seattle Ultrasonics wasn't punking me with a regular knife is because it occasionally made a sharp pinging noise if it was used while wet. It's the same high-pitched sound that a wine glass makes if you run a wet finger around its rim.

I wouldn't say the C-200 worked dramatically better than the nice new chef's knife I just got for Christmas, but it certainly sliced like a dream. I had no trouble getting it to cut paper-thin pieces of tomato with a light touch. Seattle Ultrasonics' rep likened it to riding a bike versus pedaling an e-bike in that it makes your experience more effortless.

The C-200 has been six years in the making, and the company claims it's the first ultrasonic knife on the market that's meant for home use. Commercial options are expensive and bulky; the smallest alternative is the size of a shoebox. To keep the C-200 small, its circuit board had to be folded on itself within the handle.

The C-200 is IP65-rated for water resistance, meaning you can hand-wash it like any other chef's knife. Its removable battery is rechargeable via USB-C.

The C-200's first sold-out production run begins shipping later this month, and its second batch of reservations is now live on the Seattle Ultrasonics website ahead of a March release. It retails for $399 on its own and $499 with its wireless mahogany charging tile, so it's decidedly a splurge for serious home chefs. In its defense, other premium Japanese chef's knives cost that much and don't vibrate.

Head to the Mashable CES 2026 hub for the latest news and live updates from the biggest show in tech, where Mashable journalists are reporting live.