Nutribullet Rx

Nutribullet is likely to be one of the first names to spring to mind when thinking about blenders for creating protein shakes and smoothies. The brand offers an array of personal cup-style blenders that are conveniently designed to blend up single portions of your favorite drink in the cup from which you’ll consume it.

The brand also offers full-size blenders - some of which rank among TechRadar's best blenders; but the Nutribullet Rx is a bit of a hybrid option. It’s configured like a personal cup blender, where you screw the blade assembly onto one of the two cups and turn it upside down onto the base for blending. However, it also comes with a pitcher that works in combination with a seven-minute SouperBlast program to liquefy and heat ingredients, so you can create delicious soups or sauces.

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Nutribullet Rx price and availability

Design

Performance

Should I buy?

While the oversized cup is too big for a single-serve blended drink, it’s great for making up a batch of smoothies for the whole family, especially since it comes with a pitcher lid for easy pouring. There’s a short cup, too, for creating single portions; but unfortunately, there’s no to-go lid for easy drinking on the move. Instead, there’s what Nutribullet calls a comfort lip ring, which attaches to the top of the cup to make drinking from it more, well, comfortable.

There’s no doubt this is a powerful blender, up to the task of making super-smooth drinks and soups. But the intense speed and power proved overkill for other tasks – making mayo, for example – which we’d hoped the pitcher would enable us to do. As such, the Nutribullet Rx is great for whizzing up drinks and soups, but it won’t replace a full-size blender completely.

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Nutribullet Rx: price and availability

• List price: $179.99 / £139.99

The Nutribullet Rx is available directly through Nutribullet in the US and UK. At the time of writing, it isn’t available in Australia, and we haven’t been able to ascertain whether it will be coming back into stock.

Note that the Nutribullet Rx is a cross between a full-sized blender and a personal blender. While it has a much larger capacity and more powerful motor than a standard personal cup blender (including other blenders from Nutribullet like the Nutribullet Magic Bullet Kitchen Express or Nutribullet Go) it doesn’t offer the versatility of a full-sized blender. 

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Nutribullet Rx: design and key features

• Two blending modes
• Suction cup feet
• Tall with pitcher in position

In terms of size, the Rx is much larger than Nutribullet’s other personal blenders. Its footprint on the counter is actually relatively small, but it’s tall, which could be problematic if you intend to place it beneath wall-mounted cabinets. The dimensions with the pitcher attached are 18.5 x 6.7 x 6.3 inches/ 47 x 17 x 16cm (h x w x d).

The black and gray motor base will tuck neatly into the corner of most kitchen countertops without standing out, but since it comes with two cups and a pitcher, there are plenty of accessories that will require storage space in your cupboards. There’s also an extractor blade, which fits onto both cups and the pitcher, plus a long-handled blade remover that makes it easier to remove the blade if it’s on too tight.

The 34oz/1-liter pitcher has a vented lid that allows steam to escape when making soup, and it’s used just as you would a full-sized blender pitcher. The 45oz/ 1.3-liter oversized cup comes with a lid to seal in the contents after blending, while also making pouring mess-free. Despite being the smallest of the three, the short cup still offers a decent 30oz/350ml capacity. One the contents are blended, you can attach a lip ring for more comfortable drinking, or a screw-on lid; but we’d have preferred a to-go lid of the type you get with other Nutribullet cups.

Offering just two modes, this blender is pretty intuitive to use. Once the motor base is switched on, the one-minute blending cycle will begin automatically as soon as the cup is in position. Pressing the n-button on the front for two seconds starts up the seven-minute SouperBlast mode. This mode liquifies soup ingredients using the powerful high-speed blades, and the friction created heating the liquid, giving you hot soup.

All the accessories apart from the blade are dishwasher-safe for easy cleaning.

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Nutribullet Rx: performance

• Fast and powerful
• Lacks the finesse for delicate blending tasks
• Creates very smooth drinks and soups

To try out the SouperBlast mode, we checked out the Rx recipe book online and landed on instructions for a sweet and spicy carrot soup. This simply involved adding all the ingredients to the pitcher and starting the seven-minute cycle. The Rx will blend for the full seven minutes, hitting 82dB on our noise meter, which is pretty loud.

However, at the end of those seven minutes we were rewarded with a silky-smooth soup at a steaming hot 189oF/ 87oC. Due to the short heating time, the ginger in the soup still tasted quite harsh and raw, but both the carrot and cauliflower were cooked through. It’s worth noting that some soup ingredients, such as the sweet potato in this recipe, have to be cooked in advance, which will of course add to the overall prep time. Having cleaned the soup pitcher, it was evident that the turmeric in the recipe had stained it yellow; it took a couple more cleans in the dishwasher for it to disappear.

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Next up we made a smoothie in the oversize blending cup, adding pineapple, spinach, apple juice, Greek yogurt and banana. We let it blend for the full 60-second cycle – and, given the power of this blender, we weren’t surprised that it successfully pulverized all of the ingredients into a faultlessly smooth and nicely aerated smoothie. We attached the lip ring with the intention to drink it straight from the cup, but the lip ring proved too chunky so we poured the smoothie into a glass.

We used the small cup to crush six ice cubes, letting the blend cycle run for the full 60 seconds. The ice was completely and evenly crushed into a fine snowy texture. But we did have to use a spoon to dig some of it out from the well around the edge of the blades.

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One of our standard blender tests is to make mayonnaise. Given that the Rx comes with a blending pitcher that has a removable insert in the lid, which would allow us to pour in the oil while blending,  we attempted to make mayo. Unfortunately, since the speed isn’t variable, the high-speed blending cycle proved just too intense for this delicate task, with the mayonnaise failing to emulsify. The blades had also become slightly warm, which didn’t help.

We also attempted to chop hazelnuts in the pitcher; while we were able to pulse the nuts using the on/ off switch, they quickly turned to a fine flour, rather than the chopped texture we were looking for. And, as was the case with the ice, much of this fine powder was lodged in the well around the base of the blade, so we had to use a spoon to get it out. This task also proved the loudest, hitting 86dB on our noise meter.

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First reviewed: May 2022