My Honest Review of a Blendtec Blender

An honest review of the Blendtec Total Blender Classic with fourside jar I bought at Costco. Learn how Blendtec stands vs Vitamix! Learn a few of the 45+ ways you can use a Blendtec. Read my post on how to use your blender to make green smoothies.

Alright, folks. It’s about time I gave you a legit review of a Blendtec Blender. I’ve shared with you 45+ Ways to Use a High-Powered Blender. I’ve shared photos of my blender making green smoothies, chocolate waffles, snickerdoodle hummus, and more.

I daresay it’s my favorite kitchen appliance (but don’t tell my Kitchenaid). I use it ALL THE TIME. Even if I only use it for my daily morning smoothie, it would be worth it. I’ve never seen anything blend this well!

But more on that in a minute. First I want to tell you how we even ended up with this amazing blender.

Blendtec Total Blender Review

My Blendtec blender was a birthday present. Yep!

My husband is known for giving VERY practical gifts. He once gave his mom a vacuum for Christmas! I have received many great gifts from him over the years, but the Blendtec tops them all as far as longevity goes. I still use it every day!

Note: You have MANY options when it comes to buying a blender. The price ranges are enormous – I’ve seen blenders on sale during Black Friday for $10 and I’ve seen blenders for well over $1,000.

Growing up, my family had a blender like this one:

A classic Oster 10-speed Blender with a Plastic Jar. It runs about $44 on Amazon and has cool functions like “liquify” and “ice crush”…

Except my parents didn’t really use their blender much. In fact, I’m not sure if they used it, ever. It sat in a cabinet above the microwave, and the microwave was above the stove, and the stove was chest-high…

The perfect spot for something you don’t use very often, don’t you think?

I think I know why. This is also the same blender I had when I left for college, and it was awful. Nothing liquified and the ice certainly didn’t crush. In fact, I distinctly remember NOT making certain slushy drinks because I knew my blender couldn’t do it.

That’s why when my husband and I were making our wedding registry, I eyed this lovely addition:

An Oster 6-cup Glass Jar 2-speed Toggle Beehive Blender. It runs about $60 on Amazon and I picked this blender because it had just two speeds: low and high.

I figured, what’s the point of having all those other options and buttons if they didn’t work?

That blender held up well, made us plenty of strawberry daiquiris in our newlywed days and we even took it with us glamping one weekend (glamping = camping in a trailer with electricity).

Unfortunately, I dropped the glass jar while packing up to leave and it shattered into a zillion little pieces.

We were too broke to afford a new blender, and replacing the jar was just as expensive as replacing the entire blender. So we just did without for a LONG time.

When we moved to California, my stepmom was gracious to give us her old blender. It was very similar to the one my parents had, but this one didn’t have a lid.

Yes, you read that right. No lid.

We used a small dinner plate as a pseudo-lid for a long time, and that kind of worked… as long as you weren’t blending anything too liquidy, or you didn’t add too much to the jar at one time. If you did either of those, you weren’t making smoothies. You were making a mess.

And then one night, my husband and I were walking around Costco on a date (don’t all married couples shop at Costco on a date night?) when we saw a demonstration of this:

A Blendtec Total Blender Classic. This particular model isn’t available new anymore, but you can buy it refurbished on Amazon for about $190. We bought a new model from Costco for about $300 or so several years ago.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my husband had been wanting a blender that actually worked. He saw the “Will it Blend” video of a Blendtec blending an iPhone and was immediately sold. He was just waiting for my birthday to come so he could buy it for me (to use for him!).

I hadn’t seen the video myself, but I did watch the demonstration at Costco and that was enough for me. We picked black, brought it home, and haven’t looked back since!

(Random Fact: See the little screen in the front? It shows how many blends you have. We’re well past 3,000!)

Why Use a High-Powered Blender?

No, you don’t NEED a high-powered blender. You could get along just fine with an ordinary blender from Walmart or Target. You might spend $80 and never have to replace it in your lifetime. In fact, I’ve heard good things about the Ninja Professional Blender (although I’ve never used one myself) and it’s priced right at $80 on Amazon.

But I fear having to buy things over and over… The cost of buying a less expensive blender multiple times because it keeps breaking.

We owned 3 blenders in our first 2 years of marriage. If blender #3 (stepmom’s blender with no lid) wasn’t a hand-me-down, and we actually bought a blender to replace it, we would have spent a total of $190 right there on 3 not-super-great blenders.

This isn’t me telling you to run out and blow the budget by buying a high-powered blender. We said no to a lot of things, for a long time, in order to meet our financial goals.

Instead, this is me telling you to view your purchases as an investment. Don’t buy a new cheap blender just for the sake of having a blender. Find a used blender first (check Goodwill, thrift stores, garage sales, etc.), and then save up to INVEST in a high-powered blender. When you’re ready to buy, watch for sales and get the best deal you can.

Black Friday tends to have some of the best deals of the year, but in general, the best bang for your buck is the refurbished Blendtec. It’s about half the price of a new model but still comes with a 3-year warranty (new models come with an 8-year warranty).

Blendtec Review of Different Shapes of Jars

• The main jar for the Blendtec is the fourside jar (<– one word, not a typo). That not-round shape is one of the reasons the Blendtec works so well.
  • The fourside jar holds two quarts of liquid. To put that in perspective, I can make two days’ worth of breakfast smoothies in four minutes. (Most of that time is adding the ingredients to the jar.)
• There’s also the massive wildside+ jar that holds 90 ounces! Talk about a time saver! I can make a double batch of banana bread muffins in just ONE BLEND. That’s 24 muffins, several days of breakfast, in under 5 minutes. (I don’t even have to turn the oats into flour first. I can add all the ingredients as is at one time!)
• They also sell a twister jar, which is smaller, round, and designed for thicker foods like our favorite hummus, vegan nacho cheese dip, or homemade nut butter. It comes with a special lid that you rotate as it blends, to keep the food moving in a downward direction.
  • The twister jar is genius if you ask me. This was the last jar I got for my blender and I use it so often. My kids are super happy to eat beans when I use my blender to make cookie dough hummus or black bean brownies. I mean, can a mom be any happier?

(No, I’m not ashamed to admit that I have 4 jars!)

What is a Spectacula?

If the jar itself with its super cool twister lid weren’t enough, the Twister Jar also comes with a Spectacula.

Part spatula. Part spectacular. Totally ingenious.

Perhaps my excitement over a “special spatula” is a bit extreme, but hear me out:

• The other Blendtec jars are square (or mostly square like the Wild Side). You can take a normal, flat spatula and quickly scrape down the sides of the jar without much fuss or wasting ingredients.
• The Twister Jar is ROUND. Using a regular spatula to scrape the sides of this jar is kinda like trying to fit the wooden square block into the round hole of a preschool shape sorter toy.

It just doesn’t work.

Blendtec invented the Spectacula to rescue those recipe remnants stuck to the sides of their jar. Stranded food particles are wasted food in my frugal kitchen, so I greatly appreciate and personally thank the engineer that came up with this idea!

Review of Blendtec Blender Questions

How Big is the Blendtec Blender?

One of the reasons we did NOT buy the competitor’s blender is that nearly every review we read said it was too tall to fit under kitchen cabinets. We saw with our own eyes too how big they really are, both in a demonstration and in my own sister-in-law’s kitchen (she has a Vitamix).

At the time we first bought it, we were living in California with limited storage space, and this was a HUGE deal-breaker for us.

Get this – the ENTIRE Blendtec machine, both base and jars, fit entirely underneath our kitchen cabinets. With room to spare!

• Every single jar fits on the same base too, so you don’t have to worry about multiple bases for multiple jars. This might sound kinda “duh” to some of you, but believe it or not, there are machines that WOULD require a different base to accommodate the larger-sized jar.
• Another plus is that the Blendtec is incredibly light. As I mentioned, space in the kitchen is limited. While we can store the Blendtec on the kitchen counter, we keep it in a lower cupboard underneath one of the counters.
• Pulling it out and setting up the super light 1.5 lb base is NEVER a problem. The “other machine” weighs a hefty 10 lbs. I don’t mind lifting a 10 lb baby on a daily basis, but a blender?! That’s just a bit too heavy for me. And if I’m honest, “too heavy” or “too inconvenient” usually translates to “I won’t use it.”

Review of the Blendtec Blender Design & Usability

Blendtec makes a pretty good-looking machine, right? I thought my own Classic model was WAY nicer than the competitors at the time, and now they have the Blendtec Designer Series that really adds a decorative element to your kitchen!

The fact that it’s SUPER user-friendly just makes it all the more good looking too. There are these cute little buttons that completely take the guesswork out of anything you want to make.

• Mixing muffins?
  • → Hit “batters.”
• Making a smoothie?
  • → Hit “smoothie.”
• Craving hot soup?
  • → Hit “soup.”

Each button is designed to give you EXACTLY what you’re looking for.

• The soup button gives a longer blend time to heat up the soup, so your soup is actually warm (and hot in some cases) and ready to go.
• The ice cream button knows you’ve got ice in there, so it varies the blending time so that all the ice gets pulled to the bottom and chopped accordingly (because there’s not supposed to be ice in ice cream).

Basically, these buttons are the epitome of “user-friendly.” I absolutely LOVE making whatever it is that I want to make, hitting a single button and the job getting done right the first time. This is INVALUABLE to me.

If by some chance you’re making something that doesn’t have a button, Blendtec still offers variable speed buttons and a pulse button. Simply press “up” to increase the speed, “down” to decrease the speed, or “pulse” if so desired. Easy peasy.

Review of Blendtec Blender VS Vitamix VA Ninja

Ok, so you’ve heard me go on about the amazingness of the Blendtec high-powered blender. But how does it compare? I mentioned before that I’ve used several types of blenders. Most of which don’t fit the high-powered blender category.

• I have, however, been able to use a Vitamixin person on vacation. I really wasn’t impressed. I’m not sure if it was a Vitamix 5200 or from the Vitamix Ascent Series but it didn’t blend my green smoothie nearly as well as my Blendtec.
  • I know some people swear by their Vitamix (even Starbucks switched to a specially designed Vitamix blender!), but I really didn’t like it.
• Personally, I do not have much experience with the Ninja blender. They advertise a powerful motor and it is a competition to the Blendtec. The price point on a Ninja is lower than the Blendtec or Vitamix and sometimes that can be telling in the long-term functionality of a product.

My review of the Blendtec Blender, after using a variety of blenders, is best for smoothies. I use mine daily for so many recipes.

Where to Buy a Blendtec Blender?

Are you interested in purchasing a Blendtec Blender after reading my review? I bought the Blendtec Total Classic from Costco ages ago. They still carry it and it comes with the Wildside and the Twister Jar.

If you don’t want to buy from Costco or don’t have a membership, you can buy it from Amazon.

They have it new or refurbished and you can buy each of the jars separately if you need a second (or third or fourth!) jar.

• Blendtec Total Classic with Wildside Jar
• Blendtec Refurbished with Wildside Jar
• Fourside Jar
• Wildside Jar
• Twister Jar

Overall, my review of the Blendtec blender is quite positive. I’ve used it for YEARS. It’s featured in many of my blog recipes. I even take it on vacation with me.

If you’re in the market for a new blender or are saving up to buy a high-quality kitchen appliance. I vote for Blendtec!

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