Will it blend? Blender Show Down at the First Rawsome Sunday in Berlin

This past Sunday, my friend Alex from Wamos Zentrum organized the first Rawsome Sunday in Berlin, an entire day of workshops, talks, showcases, samplings and information around raw food. It was a great event with almost 30 attendees, "wheatgrass messiah" Piter Caizer from L.A. was giving lessons on juicing and making Essene bread and raw burgers and I was teaching how to make delicious smoothies and raw nutella. A full synopsis of the workshop can also be found on rohspirit.com (in German).

One central part of the workshop was the ultimate blender test. See also this article on wasabimon.com on this issue. This Sunday 4 blenders were tested:

• my commercial Vitamix "Vitaprep 3" (about 800€ in Germany)
• the famous K-Tec (about 600€)
• Omni Mix (Taiwanese Vitamix imitation) (about 250€)
• Saro Omni Blend V (K-Tex imitation) (about 250€)

The test was a simple orange, carrot ginger smoothie, blending oranges, carrots, ginger, cashew nuts, vanilla, dates and coconut oil.

The blends were rated based on smootheness and the results were rather obvious.
The winner was the Vitaprep 3, followed by the K-Tec. The cheaper Taiwanese imitations are not getting close to the consistencies these commercial high speed blenders can achieve.

One test, I would not have even dared to do in any of the other blenders was making the most healthy and delicious raw nutella. For this I blended hazelnuts to a flour first in the dry Vitamix, then added dates, raw cacao and coconut oil and blended the whole on highest speed using the tamper to push things down constantly. This creates a very thick and sticky cream, impossible for any household blender. AND the challenge was even higher, since I assumed that the dates, Alex handed me were already pitted... well... they weren't, I figured when I heard the sound of the blades meeting the hard date pits... :-o
BUT the Vitamix even coped with this and broke them all down!!

So, my resume: I think the Omniblend is an ok alternative for people who want to start on a raw food diet and want to experiment with smoothies, raw soups, patés and alike and don't want to spend the extra dollars for the professional brands.
However, as soon as you want to do more with it and use it very frequently, especially in commercial environments, I would not try to save any money here and go for the well established brands that have been tested for years and used in raw food restaurants all over the world. There is a reason, why all raw foodists swear on their Vitamixes.

Oh, and I do NOT take any responsibiliy for any damages due to householdblender testing with date pits inspired by this artice ;-)