Breville Blend Active Personal review: The best budget blender

There’s something rather pleasing about the way the Breville Blend Active Personal looks. Smoothie makers are marketed towards healthy, active people, and the Blend Active Personal has this look down pat. Its white, grey and blue finish (green, pink and orange are also available) reminds me of a running shoe, and the two supplied cups have slender waists and finger indentations, presumably so you can keep a grip on them while slurping down kale during your morning run.

What’s in the box?

It all looks and feels well made – amazing considering the Blend Active Personal is just £20. The smoothie maker comes with a compact base, which isn’t much larger than a bag of sugar so shouldn’t take up much space in your kitchen cupboard, two tough-feeling plastic bottles and two lids and a blending blade.

The instruction manual is short and to the point – no full-colour photographs of beautiful smoothies, but that would be a bit much to expect on a machine this cheap. There is at least room for a selection of shake and smoothie recipes.

Ease of use

The smoothie maker is easy to use. Just fill up the maximum fill line (which is easier to see than on many other smoothie makers I’ve tested), screw on the blade attachment, turn the whole assembly upside down and use the blender’s bayonet fitting to attach it to the base. You then just need to hold down the Blend button until your smoothie is smooth.

Blending performance

My first test was a mixture of kale (around half the blending cup) about 120g of mixed berries and a whole sliced banana. I then topped the cup up to the maximum 600ml mark with water. The manual warns that you shouldn’t use the motor continuously for more than 30 seconds, and after this time I had a fairly smooth drink. The blades hadn’t quite dealt with the tricky kale leaves to the degree I’d hoped, and some of the larger bits stuck to my teeth. Things were better after another 30 seconds of blending; the result wasn’t as smooth as that produced by the all-conquering Sage the Boss to Go, but it was certainly pleasant enough.

I had a similar result from my second smoothie, which consisted of a chopped apple, an orange split into eight segments and a sliced banana, along with four ice cubes and topped up to the maximum fill line with orange juice. It was here that I noticed one drawback of the slim-waisted cups: there’s less room for big chunks of fruit, so I had to chop my apple into more pieces that my customary eight. After 30 seconds of blending I had a smoothie with quite a chunky consistency, but one that was still pleasant to drink. Another 10 seconds of blending reduced the size of the chunks of apple peel to make a really rather lovely fruit smoothie.

Verdict

The Breville Blend Active Personal is an excellent smoothie maker at a very low price. It produced a top-drawer fruit smoothie and one of the better kale smoothies I’ve seen. It’s not up there with the Sage the Boss to Go smoothie maker, but it’s over £100 cheaper. It’s a bargain and a Best Buy.