What Blender Does Starbucks Use? (And Should I Buy It?)

For those looking to purchase a professional, high-quality blender, a common question is: What blender does Starbucks use?

If you’re a frequent customer of Starbucks, you know just how many different drinks they make and that they use a blender to make majority of them. The blender they use must be powerful, efficient, and reliable – Starbucks obviously only uses the best of the best.

So, what blender does Starbucks use?

What Blender Does Starbucks Use?

The standard blender used at Starbucks is The Quiet One Vitamix Blender.

Starbucks uses this Vitamix blender for a variety of reasons:

It’s quiet.

Starbucks needs their blender to be quiet enough to maintain proper coffee shop ambiance, so that people can communicate and enjoy their coffee without being deafened. This blender was designed to be extremely quiet (hence the name), especially considering it is also a powerful blender; other comparable blenders are naturally quite noisier. It has several noise-reducing features, including a sound shield to help muffle some of the sound and vibrations produced by the motor.

It’s powerful.

This blender can chop through anything with a 3-peak output HP motor. Starbucks uses a lot of ice and frozen ingredients in many of their blended drinks. They need a versatile blender that can shred through ice and other such ingredients no problem, without any fuss and with consistent results.

It’s efficient.

With a constant flow of customers eagerly awaiting their drinks, Starbucks baristas move fast, and their blender needs to be able to keep up. This blender is a blend-it-once kind of machine. Even down to the no-drip, smooth-pour spout, this blender is designed for fast and dynamic use.

It’s durable.

With their consistent, heavy blender use, Starbucks needs a blender that doesn’t need frequent replacing or fixing or even much care at all. This blender is designed to put up with years of daily commercial use.

It’s programmable.

This blender comes with 6 program buttons with 34 optimized settings. This allows Starbucks to have consistent drink results, greater ease of use, and greater efficiency thanks to features such as automatic shut-off.

It’s easy to clean.

The sound enclosure is removable (although some people report it is hard to remove) and surfaces are easily accessible for cleaning.

The Quiet One Vitamix Blender Specs:

48-oz jug
3 horsepower motor
6 power levels
6 program buttons with 34 optimized settings
Removable plastic sound shield
3-year warranty

Should You Get The Starbucks Blender?

The Vitamix Quiet One Blender is clearly the best option for Starbucks, but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically the best option for you.

The Quiet One was designed specifically for Starbucks, meaning it is built for all the situations and challenges encountered in commercial coffee shops, restaurants, bars, etc.

The features that make it so great for Starbucks are most likely not necessary for your average person looking to blend up some drinks at home.

Based on customer reviews, those who rave about this blender tend to be business owners who purchased these blenders for their retail locations and found that their needs were met.

On the other hand, those who find problems with or were let down by this blender tend to be homeowners who realized it wasn’t suited to them and their needs.

Here are a few of the features of The Quiet One Vitamix that a homeowner should take into consideration:

Cost.

Perhaps most significantly, this blender is expensive. It can cost up to $2,000! That’s simply not likely to fit in the budget of your average smoothie-maker. The blender is durable and reliable, and comes with a 3-year warranty…but still, that’s far too pricey for non-commercial use. There are plenty of alternative blenders that can get the job done for a much more affordable price tag.

Noise.

Yes, we just talked about how quiet it is and the features that reduce it’s noise, but there’s still inevitably going to be some noise. Some people find that it is not as quiet as other brands. While it’s certainly the quietest blender of it’s type, it’s not the quietest blender of all.

Ease of use.

This blender is very powerful, but it might be too much power to know what to do with or to handle, at least in the beginning! This blender is made to produce consistent drinks with pre-programmed blends. Those baristas just throw in the right proportions of ingredients, press a button, and let it whip away! This is different from homemade blends, for which you might want more control over the blending process. It will likely be a bit of a learning curve to get the hang of using this blender to it’s full potential.

All that being said, this blender (or a similar quality commercial blender) might be for you if you’re looking into a Starbucks blender because you want to move away from buying expensive blended drinks everyday and dive right into making them yourself!