Ninja Mega Kitchen System and Food Processor Review

Nin­ja Mega Kitchen Sys­tem and 8‑cup Food Proces­sor is a wide­ly mar­ket­ed prod­uct. It is pre­sent­ed in infomer­cials as a dream appli­ance that com­bines a blender’s func­tion­al­i­ty, a food proces­sor, and a juicer. The gad­get includes mul­ti­ple attach­ments to per­form all of the func­tions and is avail­able in 4 dif­fer­ent mod­els — BL770, BL771, BL772, and BL773CO — which have the same motor and base unit but dif­fer only in the num­ber and selec­tion of accessories:

• Main 72 oz. pitch­er and the blade assem­bly (all models);
• 16 oz. sin­gle-serve cups and one blade assem­bly (BL770, BL771 come with 2 cups and BL772, BL773CO with 3 cups);
• 64 oz. food proces­sor bowl with the dough hook and chop­ping blade assem­bly (all models);
• 24 oz. mini prep bowl with chop­ping blade (only BL771, and BL772 models);
• Slicing/Shredding, Grat­ing Discs (BL773CO mod­el only).

Any­way, this machine should be a delight for any­one who loves home cook­ing and mak­ing smooth­ies. And here is our review to inves­ti­gate how well this infomer­cial-dri­ven prod­uct per­forms in real life.

Would you con­sid­er an alter­na­tive option? Check our pop­u­lar article:

• Best Blender for Smooth­ies and More – Buy­ing Guide 2022
• Best Blender under $200 – Is There Real­ly Cheap­er Alter­na­tive to Vitamix?
• Nin­ja Kitchen Sys­tem vs. Oster VERSA 1400-watt Pro­fes­sion­al Blender.

Dis­clo­sure: As an Ama­zon Asso­ciate, we may earn an affil­i­ate com­mis­sion for pur­chas­es you make when using the links on this page.

Functionality and Versatility

Smooth­ie: The main 72 oz. pitch­er with tow­er blade assem­bly will make rea­son­ably good smooth­ies from soft fruit and veg­eta­bles. Still, it has a prob­lem pro­cess­ing fibrous and hard ingre­di­ents such as man­go, broc­coli, car­rots, and cau­li­flower, pro­duc­ing quite a thick and grainy tex­tured drink or puree. Even if you try to blend it for over 3 min­utes, it will not be com­plete­ly smooth.  It also will not pul­ver­ize straw­ber­ries, blue­ber­ries, or oth­er skin and seeds. The blender also tends to accu­mu­late ingre­di­ents on the wall, and the user may have to stop the blender and scrape the ingre­di­ents from the sides to help cre­ate a bet­ter vortex.

The sin­gle-serve con­tain­er and blade assem­bly make much smoother fruit and green smoothies.

Juice: Although the infomer­cial men­tions that this will turn your ingre­di­ents into juice, this gad­get has no juic­ing attach­ment and does not pro­duce juice. This blender only process­es ingre­di­ents into a smooth­ie that is often called “whole juice.”

Frozen ingredients/desserts: The large pitch­er and sin­gle-serve cup are both able to crush ice ingre­di­ents very well and even effort­less­ly turn ice cubes into snow cones. How­ev­er, the low-qual­i­ty plas­tic con­tain­ers are not designed for heavy loads and may devel­op cracks with reg­u­lar ice and frozen ingre­di­ents processing.

The food proces­sor attach­ment can also make decent frozen desserts such as ice cream or sor­bet using the chop­ping blade.

Puree­ing: This blender will not make a decent veg­etable puree with or with­out adding liq­uid. The small con­tain­er will make a slight­ly bet­ter puree, but it is still far from per­fect. How­ev­er, the sin­gle-serve cup and mini prep bowl will per­fect­ly mince onion, gar­lic, and herbs.

Soup/ hot ingre­di­ents: This machine can­not make soup with­out pre-cook­ing, and that means it will not heat the liq­uid to a boil­ing tem­per­a­ture like Vita­mix and oth­er blenders. None of the gad­get con­tain­ers can han­dle hot liq­uids (hot­ter than 180°F/82°C), which is what the user’s man­u­al clear­ly states. Do not try to make bul­let­proof cof­fee or oth­er recipes that require hot ingre­di­ents; oth­er­wise, the con­tain­ers risk devel­op­ing ear­ly cracks, and this makes your machine useless.

Chopping/food prep: Using the food proces­sor con­tain­er and set of blade assem­bly, this machine is ide­al for chop­ping veg­eta­bles like onions or cab­bage for coleslaw and mak­ing sauces, sal­ad mix­es, and dips. The mini-prep bowl (BL771, BL772 mod­els) chop­ping blade will grate cheese and crumbs the same as the slicing/shredding disc which is includ­ed only in the BL773CO pack­age. Besides, the slicing/shredding attach­ment will also per­form quite well on slic­ing tasks.

Nut milk: This machine can­not effi­cient­ly homog­e­nize nuts and small seeds to make nut milk. You can try it, but the out­put will have a lot of waste after it sieves through the milk bag.

Nut but­ter: This Nin­ja machine has enough pow­er to make decent nut but­ter, although it is a bit grit­ty. You will like­ly have to stop the blender dur­ing pro­cess­ing a few times to scrape the sides and push the ingre­di­ents down to ease the pro­cess­ing job. The mini prep bowl is also able to make nut but­ter from small batch­es of nuts.

Dough/batter: This machine will effort­less­ly knead any type of dough in 30 sec­onds using the food proces­sor bowl and blade acces­sories. How­ev­er, you will have to remove the lid each time when adding extra ingre­di­ents, and that is not very handy with Ninja’s com­pli­cat­ed pro­ce­dure of lid removal.

Grinding/milling: This machine was not real­ly designed for grind­ing cof­fee beans or milling grains into bak­ing flour. The user’s man­u­al also does not men­tion that the machine is able to mill grains or grind cof­fee beans. How­ev­er, the main 72 oz. pitch­er, sin­gle-serve cup, and food proces­sor bowl is able to mill soft­er ingre­di­ents such as herbs or oats, but not the per­fect qual­i­ty like Vita­mix or Blendtec. And the sin­gle-serve cup will do this task bet­ter than the food proces­sor bowl or main pitch­er. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the main pitch­er is the worst performer.

The Nin­ja Mega Kitchen System’s claimed ver­sa­til­i­ty is achieved not by any flex­i­ble speed option (as for Vita­mix) but by mul­ti­ple attach­ments. If you do not mind han­dling and stor­ing all of them in your kitchen, then you can con­sid­er it a go for this gadget.

Speed Settings and Programs

The Nin­ja Kitchen Sys­tem Con­trol pan­el incor­po­rates 6 but­tons — Pow­er, Pulse, Sin­gle Serve and, 1) Dough, (2) Blend, and (3) Crush speed buttons.

The Blender with a large 72 oz. pitch­er oper­ates with 3 speeds and a pulse func­tion. The blender is acti­vat­ed with a Pow­er but­ton, and press­ing the appro­pri­ate speeds starts the blend­ing process until the Pow­er but­ton is pressed again to stop the blend­ing. The Pulse func­tion is run­ning while the user holds the Pulse but­ton, and this is a very use­ful func­tion for chop­ping ingre­di­ents to the desired tex­ture. This also push­es the ingre­di­ents down to cre­ate a bet­ter vor­tex dur­ing the pro­cess­ing. In fact, the 3 speeds are a lim­it­ed option for a pro­fes­sion­al blender, and most of the Nin­ja Mega Kitchen Sys­tem com­peti­tors oper­ate with a wider choice of speeds.

The Sin­gle Serve attach­ment is designed to oper­ate at 1 speed. There­fore, the user has to hold down the Sin­gle Serve But­ton while the blender is run­ning and stop blend­ing by releas­ing it.

Food Proces­sor oper­ates on 3 speeds with the chop­ping blade and on one speed with the dough blade attachment.

Ease of Using and Cleaning

Oper­at­ing: Nin­ja Kitchen Sys­tem is quite a com­pli­cat­ed machine to use. The assem­bling and dis­sem­bling process­es include many steps and a lot of clicks to lock it in and out. The first step is to lock the appro­pri­ate con­tain­er (72 oz. jar or food proces­sor bowl) to the base, and it should be aligned the right way and turned clock­wise until it clicks. The next step is to fit the blade assem­bly into the con­tain­er, fill it with ingre­di­ents, and close the lid. The lid also should be aligned and locked with a click the right way.  If the user does not assem­ble all of the parts cor­rect­ly, then the pow­er but­ton will flash, and the blender will not start. The user will have to repeat all of these com­pli­cat­ed steps to dis­as­sem­ble the blender. There­fore, this machine will not suit some­one who wants this process to be simple.

The sin­gle-serve blender is quite easy to assem­ble. It is done in the usu­al way, like all oth­er per­son­al blenders.

The remov­able blades are very sharp and must be han­dled with care. It is also not easy to fill the con­tain­ers with ingre­di­ents because the bulky blade shafts take up con­sid­er­able space inside the jars, so the food must be pre-cut and accu­rate­ly pushed down into the con­tain­er. It is also very dif­fi­cult to add extra ingre­di­ents dur­ing blend­ing, food pro­cess­ing, and espe­cial­ly dough mak­ing. Each time, the user will be required to fol­low the com­pli­cat­ed process of open­ing and clos­ing the appro­pri­ate lid.

Clean­ing: This unit is also quite dif­fi­cult and dan­ger­ous to clean if you have no dish­wash­er or pre­fer hand clean­ing. The blades are extreme­ly sharp, and there is a chance of hurt­ing your­self. The main pitch­er blade shaft has too many grooves that col­lect debris, and you have to use a small brush to clean it prop­er­ly. It is eas­i­er if you clean it in the dish­wash­er. The sin­gle-serve cup and blades are easy to clean by hand or in the dishwasher.

Base Unit and Motor Power

This machine comes with a pow­er­ful 1500 Watt motor. How­ev­er, the gear shaft and the blade to motor cou­plings are made of plas­tic. This is an obvi­ous bud­get approach to motor con­struc­tion for this quite pricey prod­uct. No won­der the Nin­ja blenders have a rep­u­ta­tion for not being durable, with an aver­age life expectan­cy of one year.

The base unit exte­ri­or hous­ing is light­weight, but it is equipped with a spe­cial lever that locks the machine to the counter. This makes it sta­ble and pre­vents any trav­el­ing over the counter dur­ing operation.

Containers

This gad­get comes with a 72 oz. main pitch­er, 64 oz. food proces­sor bowl, 16 oz. sin­gle-serve cups and 24 oz. mini prep bowl (fits into food proces­sor bowl for pro­cess­ing small­er batch­es of food). The Mini-Prep Bowl is only avail­able for the BL771 and BL772 models.

All Nin­ja Mega Kitchen Sys­tem con­tain­ers are made of BPA-free but poor-qual­i­ty poly­car­bon­ate. In addi­tion, the con­tain­ers are quite thin and are not shat­ter­proof. As a result, they are easy to crack. The Nin­ja con­tain­ers are also not tem­per­a­ture resis­tant and will not han­dle food hot­ter than 180°F/82°C. Accord­ing to cus­tomers, the main pitch­er also often devel­ops cracks around the bot­tom under the dri­ver nut.

The lids for all con­tain­ers are also cheap­ly made and look non-durable. The bud­get mod­el also presents sin­gle-serve trav­el lids. They are not a sip-and-go lid type and come with a non-clos­able drink­ing hole that can­not be sealed.

Blades

The main pitch­er, food proces­sor, and miniprep blades are all remov­able and con­struct­ed as mul­ti-lev­el stain­less steel blades stag­gered around the plas­tic spin­dle on 2 or 3 lev­els. Nin­ja presents this as an advan­tage and claims that it cre­ates a prop­er vor­tex. Still, the high-speed rota­tion and the prop­er blade design usu­al­ly do very well for oth­er blenders with­out such com­pli­cat­ed blade con­struc­tion. In fact, such Nin­ja mul­ti-lev­el blades have not proven to be able to make prop­er smooth­ies, while the Nin­ja sin­gle-serve stan­dard design blade does the smooth­ie job much bet­ter. Plus, this type of blade on the shaft design makes it hard to fill the pitch­er with ingre­di­ents. In addi­tion, the plas­tic shaft with the plas­tic motor cou­pling makes it frag­ile and not long-lasting.

Sin­gle-serve blade has stan­dard 6‑pronged (2 top prongs are rudi­men­tal) design stain­less steel blades, but all oth­er assem­bly parts are plas­tic, and this is what makes them not very durable.

Also, the blades for all attach­ments are very sharp, so the user must be care­ful while using and wash­ing them. The sharp blades are a rather weak side of any blender blade design because they become dull over time, while prop­er­ly con­struct­ed dull blades will not lose qual­i­ty per­for­mance over time.  The Nin­ja blades usu­al­ly become dull with­in 6 months.

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Special Features

Col­ors: This blender comes in one dark gray and sil­ver trimmed color.

Tam­per: This blender does not have any tam­per equipment.

Cer­ti­fied Refur­bished: The cer­ti­fied refur­bished mod­els are avail­able on Ama­zon for the Nin­ja Kitchen Sys­tem mod­el for around $90 and for the SharkN­in­ja Mega Kitchen Sys­tem BL687CO.

Use in coun­tries out­side of USA/Canada: The units sold in the USA and Cana­da come with 110–120 volt­ages; how­ev­er, this blender is avail­able in many coun­tries with an appro­pri­ate for each region volt­age sys­tem. This machine also could be used with a trans­former, but this voids the manufacturer’s warranty.

Noise

Nin­ja Mega Kitchen Sys­tem blender is a very noisy machine that exceeds the noise of oth­er com­pa­ra­ble blenders. The usu­al advice to reduce the noise out­put from blenders is to place a rub­ber mat under­neath the machine.

Warranty and Customer Service

Nin­ja Mega Kitchen Sys­tem comes with a 1‑year lim­it­ed war­ran­ty. And there is some con­fu­sion over this war­ran­ty. The Nin­ja web­site indi­cates a 5‑year lim­it­ed war­ran­ty for this unit, but the actu­al writ­ten war­ran­ty infor­ma­tion under the war­ran­ty tab also states that it is one year. So, it is pret­ty cer­tain that the gad­get comes with a 1‑year lim­it­ed war­ran­ty. A lim­it­ed war­ran­ty antic­i­pates the range of extra charges for ship­ping ($20 one way) and repairs.

Nin­ja Cus­tomer Ser­vice has a very bad rep­u­ta­tion and is con­sid­ered to be the worst in the indus­try. In addi­tion, cus­tomers’ expe­ri­ence with the blender is referred to as “nor­mal wear and tear,” which means that they refuse to stand behind their prod­ucts. How­ev­er, if you buy the item from a rep­utable retail­er like Ama­zon, they are pret­ty good about val­i­dat­ing the warranty.

Optional Accessories and Attachments

Nin­ja Mega Kitchen Sys­tem attach­ments are not inter­change­able between dif­fer­ent Nin­ja mod­els. More­over, buy the Nin­ja BL 770 machine with the min­i­mum acces­sories. You will not be able to buy an extra attach­ment inde­pen­dent­ly to upgrade to the BL772 (which comes with an extra mini prep bowl and blade) or BL773CO (which comes with extra slicing/shredding, and grat­ing discs) mod­els. There are only sin­gle-serve blades avail­able to buy sep­a­rate­ly as spare parts.

Ninja Mega Kitchen System Set Includes

Nin­ja Kitchen Sys­tem comes in four dif­fer­ent mod­els — BL770, BL771, BL772, and BL773CO.

Dimensions

The Nin­ja comes with a 9.5 inch­es x 8.2 inch­es unit base foot­print so that it will occu­py sig­nif­i­cant counter space in your kitchen. The blender’s height with the main pitch­er on the top of the base unit is 17.8 inch­es, and it will fit under most kitchen cabinets.

Be aware; this gad­get comes with mul­ti­ple attach­ments and a few very sharp blades with­out any spe­cial stor­age con­tain­er, so you will have to clear enough space in your kitchen to accom­mo­date these attachments.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• It is a pow­er­ful blender that can eas­i­ly han­dle ice and can crush ice cubes into snow cones consistently.
• This mul­ti-func­tion­al machine with mul­ti­ple attach­ments will han­dle small and large por­tions of blend­ing and food pro­cess­ing tasks, rang­ing from grat­ing, slic­ing, or chop­ping to knead­ing the dough.

Cons:

• Although this machine is mul­ti­func­tion­al, its func­tion­al­i­ty is achieved by a large num­ber of attach­ments that make the sys­tem bulky and over­ly com­pli­cat­ed to use.
• The motor, blades, and motor to the blade cou­pling sys­tem are con­struct­ed with a lot of plas­tic parts that make the blender not very long-lasting.
• The main pitch­er blade is designed in such a way that, despite the pow­er­ful motor, it does not han­dle green veg­eta­bles and fibrous ingre­di­ents well. As a result, mak­ing smooth­ies from these ingre­di­ents is too lumpy and textured.
• This machine is quite com­pli­cat­ed to set up for run­ning and cleaning.
• Con­tain­ers are made from very low-qual­i­ty poly­car­bon­ate that may devel­op cracks with­in 1 year of fre­quent use. In addi­tion, the con­tain­ers are not designed to han­dle hot tem­per­a­tures, which is very desir­able for a blender that claims to be professional.
• With its mul­ti­ple attach­ments, this machine requires a decent amount of kitchen space to store. If you have a prob­lem with stor­age space, then this blender may not suit you.

Ninja Mega Kitchen System Consumer Reviews

Despite the mul­ti­ple design faults, this gad­get has a very high con­sumer rat­ing, and this con­firms the great pow­er of advertising.

Price

The price varies while nor­mal­ly stay­ing under two hun­dred dol­lars depend­ing on the mod­el, retail­er, and spe­cial offers. Some retail­ers offer a com­pet­i­tive price, and it is get­ting cheap­er com­pared to the price of this gad­get 3–4 years ago.

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Summary

Not every­thing works the same way as adver­tised, and this is the case with the Nin­ja Mega Kitchen Sys­tem. This machine is bulky and very com­pli­cat­ed to use, with mul­ti­ple con­tain­ers and attach­ments that will take up a lot of cab­i­net space in your kitchen. In addi­tion, a few design flaws make this pow­er­ful motor blender not a very good per­former. For exam­ple, it is not even able to pro­duce a decent green smooth­ie. And if you are look­ing for a good val­ue for your mon­ey blender to make good qual­i­ty smooth­ies, then this machine will hard­ly suit you. But if you are look­ing for a machine with lim­it­ed blenders and food pro­cess­ing abil­i­ties, then Nin­ja can be a good choice.

Alter­na­tive­ly, check our articles: 

• Best Blender for Smooth­ies and More – Buy­ing Guide 2022
• Best Blender under $200 – Is There Real­ly Cheap­er Alter­na­tive to Vitamix?
• Nin­ja Kitchen Sys­tem vs. Oster VERSA 1400-watt Pro­fes­sion­al Blender.