REASONS TO BUY
Inexpensive
Has a personal smoothie pitcher
REASONS TO AVOID
Bad at blending drinks
Substandard smoothies
Poor pureeing
Oster Simple Blend 100 Review
This discount blender didn't particularly distinguish itself and finished at the back of the pack
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Our Verdict
While the Oster Simple Blend 100 is exponentially less inexpensive than the rest of the group, it also scored correspondingly poorly. If you are searching for a blender on an extremely tight budget and you can tolerate the subpar performance, then this might be a good bet. However, we would usually recommend you just save up a little longer for a much better product.
Our Analysis and Test Results
The Oster Simple Blend received the lowest score of the entire group, performing significantly worse than the Nutri Ninja. However, it does retail for about a fifth of the cost of the Nutri Ninja and includes a personal smoothie pitcher, making the Simple Blend 100 an option if you are shopping on a super tight budget and want to grab smoothies to go. However, the quality of smoothies produced by the Simple Blend 100 is definitely wanting.
The Oster Simple Blend 100.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
Performance Comparison
To determine which blender is truly a cut above the rest, we bought the best and tested them head-to-head to find out which appliance truly bested the rest. We rated each blender's performance in five weighted metrics, with the performance of the Simple Blend 100 elaborated upon below.
The Oster Simple Blend ready for its Oreo shake test.
Credit: Austin Palmer
Smoothies
Earning the most weight out of all of our metrics, our Smoothies metric is responsible for 30% of the overall score for each blender. We judged the performance of the Oster Simple Blend based on the quality of the green smoothie, Oreo shake, berry smoothie, and fruit and oat smoothie that it produced. It didn't do terribly well, earning a 4 out of 10 for its performance, tying with the VERSA and the Nutri Ninja for the lowest score of the group.
The Simple Blend 100 did about average at mixing a fruit and oat smoothie. We had to stop multiple times and scrape the pitcher to get it to keep blending.The final drink was exceptionally thick, but there weren't any whole strawberries that escaped blending, like the VERSA. The berry smoothie was also about average in quality, though there were plenty of seeds that escaped the blade.
The Oster performed poorly in our berry smoothie test, with many seeds escaping the blades.
Credit: Austin Palmer
The green smoothie was abysmal. It had a watery texture throughout that was interspersed with chunks of greens. This caused an incredibly uneven flavor profile and an all-around unpalatable drink.
The Simple Blend's poor performance blending a green smoothie.
Credit: Austin Palmer
The Simple Blend didn't do very well with the Oreo shake test, leaving an entire cookie unblended. It also took a lot of intervention on our part to get the shake to actually blend, requiring us to scrape the pitcher a handful of times.
Take caution with frozen drinks, you may be left with large ice chunks or worse a blender on fire.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
Ice
Our Ice metric takes up 20% of the overall score, with the Simple Blend 100 again delivering an extremely subpar score. This blender earned a 2 out of 10 for its poor performance, failing to impress us in either of the tests.
This blender did an average job at crushing ice, though it took three times as long as other products and left an entire ice cube intact. It did a terrible job at blending a margarita, failing to fully blend it and actually starting to smoke and give off a terrible smell. We stopped the test and the blender was fine after a break, but we weren't at all keen to try again.
The blade of the Simple Blend is removable making it easy to clean.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
Convenience
Meriting the equivalent weight to our Ice metric, Convenience is also responsible for 20% of the overall score. The Simple Blend actually had a decent showing, earning a 6 out of 10 for its performance — the only metric where the Simple Blend 100 performed above average.
The Simple Blend is dishwasher safe and isn't too much work to wash by hand, provided you disassemble it first. Otherwise, there wasn't really sufficient space to clean around the blades.
This model lacks a digital timer and preset functions that stop automatically, but the interface is clearly labeled with text and easy to understand. The presets shown correspond to different speed settings, not different cycles
The, not so different, speed settings of the Simple Blend.
Credit: Jenna Ammermn
The lid is a little difficult to remove, but this blender is on the quieter side when compared to the rest of the pack.
The Simple Blend ready to fail at making nut butter.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
Pureeing
Accounting for 15% of the total score, our Pureeing metric assessed how well each blender made almond butter, liquefied tomato soup, and heated it up. The Oster Simple Blend again fell far short of the mark, meriting a 3 out of 10 for its efforts.
This blender failed at making nut butter, with the motor base becoming extremely hot and emitting a foul smell, forcing us to abort the test. The Simple Blend did a little better at making the soup, leaving some unblended parts of soup that didn't make it through the sieve.
Just like Mama Bear's porridge this soup is too cold!
Credit: Austin Palmer
This model also didn't really heat up the soup, only boosting its temperature to about 83°F.
Ready to begin turning popcorn seeds into corn meal.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
Grinding
For our final metric, worth 15% as well, we judged how well the Oster Simple Blend did at grinding up hard food. It did not do well, again earning a 3 out of 10 for its poor showing. We used three different tests for this metric: grating hard cheese, grinding cornmeal, and making powdered sugar.
The Simple Blend never achieved a finely-powdered mixture in the sugar test, leaving behind plenty of granulated sugar. It also did poorly when tasked with milling popcorn into cornmeal, with only about 15% of the final mixture easily passing through a sieve.
You are better off making a trip to the store instead of making your own corn meal with the Oster Simple Blend.
Credit: Austin Palmer
However, this blender did do an acceptable job at grating parmesan cheese. It wasn't quite fine enough for the shaker — about the same level of coarseness as the Nutri Ninja.
Value
This cheap blender performed very poorly, making it an unattractive value pick.
Conclusion
While this blender is inexpensive, you would be much, much better served by our Best Buy award winner, the KitchenAid Diamond if you can afford it, as it is a much, much better blender overall.
—
David Wise and Austin Palmer
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