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£60 BLENDERS ROUGH UP TOP SMOOTHIE MAKERS

Typical blender

Saturday March 22,2008

By Louise Barnett

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EXPENSIVE gadgets for making fruit juices and smoothies may be no better than simple blenders costing almost £300 less, say consumer watchdogs.

State-of-the-art juicers for the home can cost up to £329, but Which? found that inexpensive blenders do the job just as well.

It tested the performance of 46 machines and concluded: “Smoothie makers are a relatively new phenomenon and seem to be a triumph of marketing.

“By adding a tap to a jug blender, they attempt to cash in on our obsession with healthy drinks.”

Which? tested the appliances for speed, noise and ease of use besides how well they mashed fruit and vegetables.

The top-ranked gizmos were jug blenders, with one priced at £60 from Breville scoring 86 out of 100. Specialist juicers are better for harder fruit and veg like apples and carrots but are often more fiddly to assemble and clean, testers found.

Centrifugal juicers, which separate juice from pulp, fared worse. The best was a £50 Breville, which scored 74 per cent, while the Waring Pro at £329 managed only 64 per cent.

Which? tested five expensive masticating juicers, which crush fruit and veg. The best was a Samson, costing £179, which scored 72 per cent, and the most expensive, a £319 Twin Health Juice Extractor, was bottom with 59 per cent.

Shop-bought smoothies cost about £1.79, while a home-made one is 62p less on average.

Smoothie makers are a relatively new phenomenon and seem to be a triumph of marketing

Which?

I'VE BEEN MAKING SMOOTHIES...

22.03.08, 11:41am

...since even before they were called 'smoothies' - cheaper, no additives, and easy to make in a cheap blender.
Those so called 'whole fruit' juicers are a waste of time - they do NOT take WHOLE fruit, it still has to be chopped and de pipped / stoned !

• Posted by: BoggyDepot • Report Comment