Fibrous Greens Test for Personal Blenders

This test is part of How We Test Our Personal Blenders v1.0

Today’s health-conscious consumers have fueled an ever-growing demand for nutrient-dense blended drinks. If you are a fan of green smoothies and think you need more fiber, you may want to know how efficient your personal blender is at processing leafy vegetables. This test will give you some practical answers.

Why The Test Matters

Our leafy smoothie gets its vibrant green color from kale, spinach, and celery. This particular recipe is very bitter, but our whole purpose here is to evaluate how well each blender handles vegetable fiber. The celery, in particular, should help differentiate the good blenders from the mediocre ones. 

When you actually go to make your own green smoothie, you’ll probably want to add a little fruit to sweeten your drink.

Simply put, this test is meant to be hard on the blenders. Any machines that produce perfect results will get a rousing recommendation from our team.

Testing Recipe: 1 Serving 

• 1 oz kale 
• 0.5 oz spinach 
• 1 oz celery 
• 1 cup water

Testing Procedure

We begin the test by cutting all the ingredients into 1-inch pieces, then placing them in the cup in the following order: spinach, kale, celery, and water. Initially, we thought it wouldn’t be necessary to cut our veggies into small chunks, but our trials on low-capacity blenders such as the Hamilton Beach suggested otherwise. Personal blenders often have narrow jars, so if you don’t cut ingredients small enough, there simply won’t be enough room for them to move around. You’ll end up with an undrinkable combination.

Our trials also indicated that 20 seconds worth of blending was enough to illuminate differences in performance. We run each blender at its highest speed for those 20 seconds and then filter its results through a mesh strainer. We then base our ranking on the particle size and amount of pulp that’s left behind. 

However, while we find it quite easy to visually distinguish between these pulp tailings, you may not agree. All the smoothies look roughly the same in photos, so we added an additional step. After straining out the pulp, we will hold each batch under running tap water. The steady stream of water washes smaller pulp particles out, leaving only the larger unblended solids. Finally, we put that remaining pulp into a glass of filtered water. That way, you can get a clearer perspective on each blender’s result. 

Scoring Scale

We put each blender through this test and give them scores on a 0-10 scale based on  their output. This score makes up 20% of the total performance score. 

Blended Result Score 

The blended result score was marked on a 10-point scale based on the pulp’s fineness. We found that we could categorize the pulp into four distinct variants: 

• Very fine: 9.5-10 points 
• Fine: 8 - 9 points
• Coarse: 6 - 7.5 points
• Very coarse: 5.5 points or less