7 Best Blenders for Making Baby Food, Lab-Tested and Reviewed
These top-rated blenders make a purée smooth enough for infants, but also come in handy long after your baby outgrows the “mush” phase
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Dedicated baby food makers are good at puréeing and mashing food, but they can be expensive—especially considering they aren’t needed for long and end up being tossed or donated once your baby graduates to solid foods. A blender that excels at puréeing, though, will not only whip up mushy peas and sweet potatoes for your little one but also see continued use blending soups, smoothies, and more for the whole family.
In our lab tests, we use raw vegetables to assess a blender’s ability to purée. An excellent rating means it can produce food with no chunks or stringy fibers.
Making baby food, however, may require additional steps depending on the blender you use. The Department of Agriculture advises caregivers to avoid giving babies uncooked foods. That pertains not only to meat, fish, and eggs but also to vegetables and fruit. As an added benefit, heating these foods can also make them more digestible for infants. So generally, you’ll want to cook the food first before puréeing.
Some blenders can heat food as they purée it, and several of the models highlighted below are capable of doing so beyond a safe temperature of 165° F. Vitamix blenders, for example, generate heat through friction between the blades and the ingredients. “Our test recipe—broccoli soup—reaches 165° F in just 5 minutes and 45 seconds,” says Hanna Bury, a spokesperson for the company.
This may tempt busy parents to skip the precooking step, but our safety experts advise using extra care. “If you are using one of the blenders that cook, I would make sure the product after blending gets to the proper temperature prior to cooling and feeding using a thermometer,” says James E. Rogers, PhD, Consumer Reports’ director of food safety research and testing. Rogers suggests bringing foods to 165° F to be sure they’re safe.
Here are seven top-performing full-sized blenders, listed in alphabetical order, that will help you make nutritious food for your baby and the rest of the family. All of them are whizzes at puréeing and aren’t a hassle to use or clean. Many have also excelled in CR’s durability tests.
While the highest-performing blenders at the top of our ratings cost hundreds of dollars, we also recommend some solid performers that won’t put a dent in your baby’s college fund. There’s one major factor to keep in mind while you’re shopping, though: Very few blenders earn better than a middling score in CR’s noise tests, so you might not want to operate one while your baby is sleeping.
Consumer Reports members can check out our blender ratings for more options and our blender buying guide for shopping advice. And because affordability is one of the main reasons for making baby food at home, check out our list of the best blenders for $100 or less if price is a major consideration.
The Cuisinart Hurricane Pro 3.5 Peak HP CBT-2000 blender excels at puréeing and making smoothies, plus it’s a breeze to use. It doesn’t come with any accessories or a removable blade (less clutter in your cabinets), but it’s easy to clean overall, and its jar is dishwasher-safe. It weighs 11 pounds—on the high end of this list—so you may want to save your energy by leaving it on the counter instead of storing it away.
The Ninja Professional Plus Kitchen System BN801 aces our tests for puréeing and durability, plus it excels in our convenience evaluations, which are based on ease of cleaning, ease of pouring, jar weight, and clarity of jar markings and controls. This nine-cup model comes with a personal blender attachment, two 24-ounce cups, a food chopper attachment, and a dough blade (not that you’ll have the energy to make bread exactly, but for future reference). Ninja, as a brand, earns very good scores for predicted reliability and owner satisfaction based on our latest member surveys.
The BN701 Professional Plus with Auto iQ earns top scores in our tests for puréeing, convenience, and durability, and based on CR’s surveys, owners are very satisfied with their purchase. Though it also scored well in our puréeing and ice crushing tests, it got just a middling score on blending smoothies, so something to keep in mind if you also want a blender that can make good smoothies when it retires from baby duty.
The NutriBullet Smart Touch NBF50420 is a powerful, 1,500-watt blender that aced our purée, convenience, and durability tests. It also turned out icy drinks with a uniform texture and purées that left few, if any, small chunks in the series of sieves we use to evaluate them. This 8-cup blender has touchscreen controls, 7 speeds, and, like other top-scoring blenders, a plastic jar.
Vitamix’s Ascent X2 and Ascent X5 blenders may challenge your budget, but we’d be remiss not to include them, as they rank among the top-scoring blenders in our ratings and, like the other models here, net excellent results in our puréeing and in past durability tests. The Ascent X2 ranks a hair above the X5, though both share the same Overall Score. As with the Vitamix Propel 750 below, both offer a hot soup program (for the X2, it’s one of three programs, for the X5, one of 10). They also share Vitamix’s outstanding reliability and owner satisfaction scores. Their jars are slightly smaller than the Propel’s (48 ounces), but their 10-year warranties are longer.
The 1400-watt Vitamix Propel 750 places just above the Ascent models in our ratings, and like them, earned superb scores in our puréeing and durability tests. Its BPA-free plastic jar holds 64 ounces, and it offers 10 speeds and four blending programs, including one that heats food while blending. Like those above, it shares Vitamix blenders’ exceptionally high scores for reliability and owner satisfaction, based on our member surveys. It comes with a seven-year warranty.
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