The Nutribullet Smart Touch blender is a family-sized blender with a 62.2 fluid ounce volume pitcher. Whether you’re making soups, slushies, smoothies, or nut milk, this is a powerful 1500W blender that’s up to the challenge. And it’s only $99! Is it too good to be true? Or could the Smart Touch be one of our best blenders?
As the Smart Touch is family-sized, it goes without saying that this is a big blender. At 17.3 x 8.3 x 8.3 inches, this might take up an entire countertop in your kitchen, so you’d need to find space to store this behemoth before purchasing. But, as the Smart Touch is family-sized, it’s powerful. The blender made silky-smooth cashew milk in ten seconds and a delicious berry smoothie in twenty. The trade-off? It’s loud.
The pros outweigh the cons with this powerful giant, but is it enough to be one of the best sub-$100 blenders? Find out in my Nutribullet Smart Touch blender review.
Nutribullet Smart Touch review: Cheat sheet
- What is it? A family-sized blender with immense power
- Who is it for? If you’re making more than a couple of servings of soups, smoothies, frozen drinks, milkshakes
- What does it cost? $99 at Amazon U.S. and £129 at Amazon U.K.
- What do we like? How it can turn frozen berries and liquid into a smoothie in seconds
- What don’t we like? It’s really loud, really big, and cleaning under the blades is a little annoying
Nutribullet Smart Touch review: Specs
Nutribullet Smart Touch review: Price & availability
The Nutribullet Smart Touch blender is $99 at Amazon U.S. and $129 at Amazon U.K. Most Nutribullets are priced from around $39 up, meaning the Smart Touch is one of the more expensive models. With a higher price comes higher blending power at 1500W compared to the Magic Bullet — Nutribullet’s entry-level $19 offering — at only 250W. The 1400W Ninja Professional Plus Blender is $119, making the Smart Touch its closest competitor.
Nutribullet Smart Touch review: Design & controls
The Smart Touch looks like a generic big blender, but with a touch of modernity. Instead of raised buttons that collect grime and dirt, the Smart Touch has, you guessed it, smart touch controls! When you put the blender jug on the base and close the lid fully, the screen lights up with a series of options. You can choose from: ‘purees’, ‘smoothies’, ‘frozen drinks’, and ‘soups’, and the standard ‘pulse’, ‘low’, ‘medium’, and ‘high’. If you choose a preset, the timer counts down, but if you choose a blade speed, the timer counts up.
There isn’t much flare to the Smart Touch’s design, and the base component is massive. It’s 8.3 inches x 8.3 inches at its tallest and widest, which takes up almost an entire countertop in my kitchen. If you have a large cupboard in which to store your blender, this might not be a problem, but for smaller kitchens, this blender would be too big to realistically have out on the counter. If you’re spatially-restricted, you’d be better off with the Nutribullet Pro 900 ($84).
The Smart Touch has suction feet, a nice locking mechanism that makes the pitcher super sturdy on the base, and a great lid safety feature. The blender will only start if the lid is correctly secured on top, meaning you won’t get the dreaded smoothie-on-ceiling disaster.
Unlike the Ninja Professional Plus blender ($119), the Smart Touch doesn’t come with any different jug attachments. I would like to see Nutribullet release a food processing attachment or a crushing pitcher, like Ninja does.
Nutribullet Smart Touch review: Blending performance
As soon as I cleaned the jug and lid with hot soapy water, I quite literally threw the Smart Touch in at the deep end. For my first blending test, I added the following to the jug: ice, frozen mixed berries, kale, celery, raw ginger, oat milk, and almonds. Now, that’s a complicated task for even the most advanced blenders. I used the smoothie setting first, which takes sixty seconds, and resulted in a smooth drink. Second, I added more frozen berries and set it to blend on ‘high’. I let it run for twenty seconds and was greeted with a smooth liquid with no chunks or lumps.
As my second mode of testing, I put the Smart Touch to work making cashew milk. To make the cashew milk, I filled the Smart Touch jug with 1 part soaked raw cashews and 4 parts filtered water. Then I put the Smart Touch on ‘high’ for about 60 seconds. The Smart Touch blender made light work of the cashew milk, and I didn’t even have to strain the liquid afterwards — there was not a single chunk of cashew left.
I left the hardest test for last. Nut butter is like the final boss for blenders. The Bowser of the blending world, if you will. Now, I’ll manage your expectation by prefacing that nowhere does Nutribullet claim that the Smart Touch is capable of making nut butter. In fact, Nutribullet says you shouldn’t blend dry ingredients in their blenders to prevent blade and motor damage. But as an almond butter addict, I had to see if the Smart Touch was up to the task.
So I poured 7 ounces of almonds into the blender and set it to ‘high’. Immediately the Smart Touch made light work of grinding the almonds up to a fine powder. If I was making macarons and needed almond flour, I could’ve stopped there. But I was hungering for creamy almond butter, so I scraped the sides of the jug and set it to high again.
Although it took about 35 minutes of slowly adding oil and blending-scraping-blending-scraping, the Smart Touch did manage to make almond butter.
If you’re a nut butter fiend, you’ll probably need to spend a considerable amount more to get something like the Breville Super Q ($499). But if you’re happy with nut butter that looks more like thick paste than the gloopy, runny stuff you’ll find in organic grocery stores, the Smart Touch is more than enough.
It goes without saying that blenders are loud, but the Smart Touch is loud. To test the volume at its presumed maximum, I blended ice and water. The Smart Touch clocked in at 102 dB, which is as loud as a motorcycle exhaust. Blending ice is the loudest thing you can possibly do, though, unless you suddenly develop a taste for blending metal.
Nutribullet Smart Touch review: Storage & maintenance
While there’s no cleaning mode, you don’t need one, and any blender that says you do is lying to you. If you’ve made a smoothie, soup, a slushie, milkshake, or anything liquidy, cleaning is super easy.
All you have to do is rinse the blender in the sink, squeeze in a drop of washing up liquid, fill it about ⅓ with warm water, and blend on low for about thirty seconds. This usually gets 99% of the remaining smoothie or soup, then all you have to do is inspect the blades for stragglers.
Quite frustratingly, you can’t remove the blades of the Smart Touch, so if you have some stubborn muck on the blades you have to get in there with a brush, as I was forced to do when I made almond butter. That’s probably the only major disappointment of the Smart Touch besides its size. I understand why Nutribullet soldered the base on, but I would’ve liked to see the manufacturer include some cleaning tools.
As briefly touched upon earlier, I would only recommend this blender to those with large kitchen space or cupboards you can stow it away in. The base is huge (a sacrifice one must make for a blender with this much power) and the plug cord is long and bulky. The 62.6 fluid ounce pitcher seems to be the only jug you can use with the Smart Touch, so if you wanted a smaller capacity, you’re out of luck with this one.
However, this is classed as a ‘family’ blender, and it’s certainly large and powerful enough to do just that.
Should you buy the Nutribullet Smart Touch blender?
If you need a blender with a big pitcher and enough power to make smoothies for 4+ people, this is a great entry-level option. I can hardly believe this is only $99, when it works as well as pricier models like the Smeg High Performance Blender ($429). While the Smart Touch doesn’t have the retro glamor of the Smeg offering, it can blend frozen berries and milk into a decadent smoothie in seconds.
It is worth noting that the Smart Touch is loud and a bit finicky to clean, but that’s a fair trade-off for blending power this astronomical, and all for less than $100.
