What Should I Know About Buying A New Blender?

Blenders – What Have They Usually Been Used For?
It seems like blenders have pretty much done the same things forever.
Blend a margarita? Yep, that’s about what they do.
Most people just seem to make cocktails. Some people have evolved recently to making healthy drinks, starting with the “Smoothie” in the 1970’s.
A very small group of others, mostly chefs or sophisticated home cooks, also use their blenders to make real food, from sauces to even kneading bread and have done that for a long time.
What Do People Use Blenders For Now?
The latest blending jobs include “Green” drinks. Green drinks increase the nutrients of the “Smoothie” by adding vegetables into a drink that got stuck with the generic name for its color. Not very original but with whole vegetables of almost any type blended in what used to be a fruit filled drink, they’re full of nutrients.
Which brings us to today’s blender uses. Today’s blenders require more power than they have before to chop up all of those vegetables. It would have been tough to make what most people call a green drink with a blender from the 1960’s.
With the new blender power that was brought to market by several blender manufacturers in the 1990s, people started coming up with more uses for their new power blenders.
Some manufacturers, most famously Blendtec, used their blender power in videos to ask, “Will It Blend?”. Featuring Blendtec’s founder, Tom Dickson, the video series takes an object like an I-Phone, that you would never think of putting in a blender, and tries to blend it in a Blendtec.

Traditional blender manufacturers like Vitamix, a blender pioneer, also have created more powerful blenders in more recent years, but don’t make videos dropping I-Phones into them.
What Can Some Of The Newest Blenders Do?
With all of the power now available in some blenders, some blender manufacturers have added more blender attachments and functions to try to use the blender motor to do other things like food processing and nut grinding.
The Shark Ninja company is maybe the best example of this, they have some blender models that will do just about everything your food processor will do, depending on which attachment you use on the blender motor base.
Which Blenders Can You Get For $200 Or Less?
Depending on your budget, you have a large range of options with blenders. There are a lot of blenders that you can buy for less than $100 that will mix a cocktail and a lot of the other stuff that more info most people do with blenders every day, without needing all of the functions that are in the higher priced blenders.
These least expensive blenders are, as you might expect, the most popular, since most people just use their blenders to do the usual, simple blending jobs.
A lot of the blenders in the $100 to $200 price range will do a lot of the more demanding blender jobs that have recently been added to more powerful blenders. The Shark Ninja blenders typically fall into this category.
The issue with these blenders and with those priced less than $100 is that they don’t typically last a long time.
A good indication of this is the length of their manufacturer’s warranty. Check to see how long it lasts. The length of the warranty may be a signal of how long that blender will actually last before breaking in some way.
What About The More Expensive Blenders?
More expensive blenders, including Vitamix and Blendtec cost anywhere from $300 to almost $600. These blenders have the most power and can do some of the toughest blender jobs, like nut grinding or grinding vegetables with thick stalks and a lot of pulp.
These blenders will also likely last a lot longer than the lower priced blenders. Their warranties reflect their longer lifespans too. Vitamix and Blendtec warranties often last at least 5 years, some options even extend them to 10.
A lot of professional kitchens and commercial drink companies like Jamba Juice and Starbucks have these kinds of blenders to do their blending.
It’s also a question of blending quality. These higher priced blenders typically deliver a blend that is smoother and, well, better blended than the lower priced models.
So What Should You Do?
So with blenders, it does seem like you get what you pay for. The more expensive blenders are usually of higher quality materials, will have more powerful motors and will likely last a lot longer than the lower priced blenders.
It’s a pretty straightforward question for most of us:
What do you do with your blender?
If your answer is, “I make margaritas once a month when a couple friends come over, then hide the thing somewhere in the corner of my kitchen”, then go with the less than $100 price range blenders.
If you’re regularly grinding nuts and blending celery as part of your morning routine, then you probably already know what you’ll need to spend and even which blender to choose since you probably already have one.
The only uncertainty in this decision comes from when you don’t use the higher function blender techniques, but you really want to!
If you get more info think you’ll follow through and actually make nut butter or full-fledged vegetable smoothies, then you can probably justify buying the expensive blenders since they’ll last so long.
Otherwise, you’ll just be buying a very expensive margarita machine