I bought this item specifically for grinding spices and herbs for indian cooking. It does a fairly decent job with the spices although you need to have at least 1/4 cup for it to work well. As to the herbs perhaps I'm doing something wrong but it did not do as well. The herbs that were above the blade stayed put and it took a lot of scraping the bowl to get them chopped up. An addition of something solid (perhaps an onion or a some butter) would probably take care of the problem but just the leaves on their own give this processor a hard time.