Nutri Ninja Pro BL451/BL456/BL455 Blender Review

The Nutri Nin­ja Pro BL451, BL456, and BL455 are the most basic mod­els in the Nin­ja per­son­al blender prod­uct line. They come in 3 dif­fer­ent pack­ages — Nutri Nin­ja Pro BL451, BL456, and BL455 — which dif­fer by num­ber and the capac­i­ty of cups and recipe books includ­ed. These gad­gets are very pop­u­lar among con­sumers due to the pro­fes­sion­al adver­tis­ing cam­paign. But do they real­ly per­form that well and have all of those incred­i­ble fea­tures that the Nin­ja claims in the advertising?

Here is our hon­est review, which reveals all of the good and bad sides of these pop­u­lar blenders.

Would you like to look at alter­na­tive options? Check here our arti­cles the Best pow­er­ful but afford­able per­son­al type’s blenders and NutriBul­let 600 watts Blender vs Nutri Nin­ja Pro BL450/BL451/Ninja BL456 Nutri Edge.

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: This blender makes decent drinks, includ­ing green smooth­ies. It oblit­er­ates well not only fruits but also leafy and tough ingre­di­ents like kale, chard, or car­rots. This machine is also able to han­dle straw­ber­ry or blue­ber­ry seeds and pul­ver­izes them in the drinks with­out any residue left. It will also blend nuts and oats to mix them with the drinks, but some nuts need pre-soak­ing. How­ev­er, it may leave some small chunks of very tough ingre­di­ents, but, in gen­er­al, it does an excel­lent job.

Ice crush­ing, frozen desserts: It does crush ice very well in the drinks. More­over, this is the only per­son­al blender in the price range that process­es ice with­out any liq­uid added into the snow like con­sis­ten­cy. This is also a per­fect machine for mak­ing var­i­ous frozen desserts or shav­ing ice for mar­gar­i­tas and oth­er drinks.

Juic­ing: This machine will not squeeze clas­sic style juice by sep­a­rat­ing the fiber from a liq­uid, but it is able to make a creamy enough drink with liq­uid added to process “whole juice” or smooth smoothie.

Nut milk: This gad­get is pow­er­ful enough to make decent nut milk from a vari­ety of nuts.

Hot food: As stat­ed in the user man­u­al, Nutri Nin­ja Pro gad­gets are not designed to han­dle hot food. If you require liq­ue­fy­ing ingre­di­ents for soup, you will need to cool them to room tem­per­a­ture before putting in the Nin­ja. This machine is also not suit­ed for pro­cess­ing bul­let­proof coffee.

Nut But­ter: This blender is bare­ly able to pro­duce decent nut but­ter, prob­a­bly only a mix­ture of very coarse con­sis­ten­cy. In gen­er­al, the bul­let type blenders are not good for this pur­pose because it is quite dif­fi­cult to process nut but­ter with­out mix­ing ingre­di­ents and remov­ing air pock­ets dur­ing blending.

Puree­ing and chop­ping and mix­ing: Although this machine oper­ates with only one pulse func­tion, it is able to pro­duce a sim­ple vari­ety of vinai­grette, sal­ad dress­ings, dips, and sauces. It will homog­e­nize not very tough veg­eta­bles into a fair­ly smooth puree. It will chop quite well and turn all types of nuts into very good nut powder.

Grind­ing and milling: This blender is capa­ble of sim­ple grind­ing such as pow­der­ing cof­fee beans, herbs, or oats, but it can­not mill bak­ing qual­i­ty grain flours.

Dough knead­ing: The machine is not designed to knead the dough. How­ev­er, it will make quite decent cook­ies and pan­cake batter.

Although a major­i­ty of per­son­al blenders are designed to han­dle a quick and sim­ple range of tasks, the Nutri Nin­ja Pro is a quite ver­sa­tile machine and is able to pro­duce a vari­ety of recipes. The only draw­back of this machine design is that it is not able to han­dle hot liquids.

Nutri Nin­ja Pro BL456 Blender, via Ama­zon

Speed Settings and Programs

The Nutri Nin­ja Pro BL451, BL456, BL455 do not have a typ­i­cal con­trol pan­el, speeds choice, or on/off switch. They are oper­at­ed on one speed with a pulse func­tion by press­ing down the top of the cup against the base unit in short inter­vals. The user must hold and push the cup dur­ing oper­a­tion until the desired food con­sis­ten­cy is reached. This type of oper­a­tion is com­mon for per­son­al type blenders. How­ev­er, it does not allow a lot of flex­i­bil­i­ty dur­ing the blend­ing process; many peo­ple like this type of gad­get because it is so easy to use.

Ease of Using and Cleaning

Using: The Nutri Nin­ja Pro is a very easy machine to use. Add the ingre­di­ents into the cup, screw the blade assem­bly until there is a good seal, flip it over and place on the base unit, turn it clock­wise, and it is ready to use. When blend­ing is fin­ished, just unscrew the blade from the cup and replace it with the sip­py lid. The oper­a­tion is also a sim­ple task, and blend­ing is acti­vat­ed by the push of the top part clock­wise on a base.

The blender is not sup­posed to be run longer than 1 minute in one go, but that is the usu­al case for a bul­let, pulse type machines. Usu­al­ly, you have to keep an inter­val of a few sec­onds before ini­ti­at­ing anoth­er push for running.

Clean­ing: This machine is also very sim­ple to clean. The cups and blade assem­bly are dish­wash­er safe. How­ev­er, some peo­ple report cups’ edges melt­ing and seal­ing dam­age after clean­ing in the dish­wash­er. So, hand wash­ing is prob­a­bly prefer­able for this gad­get, which also is an absolute­ly sim­ple task. Just rinse out with soap and water or fill the cup with water and few drops of soap and run the blender for a few sec­onds. The self-clean­ing is effec­tive for thor­ough clean­ing of the blender because it removes even the tini­est food residue from all blade assem­bly cavities.

Base Unit and Motor Power

For a per­son­al blender, the Nutri Nin­ja Pro has a very pow­er­ful 900-watt (BL451 and BL456 mod­els) and 1000-watt (BL455 mod­el) motors. The motors are equipped with a safe­ty sys­tem that auto­mat­i­cal­ly shuts off the machine in case of over­load­ing and pre­vents motor dam­age. The machine requires 30 min­utes of cool­ing time before the gad­get will be ready to use again.

But it has a weak point; the blade to dri­ve con­nec­tion is made with frag­ile plas­tic, and this makes the machine not very durable.

Containers

The blender comes with 18 oz., 24 oz. (all mod­els) and an extra 12oz. (BL451 mod­el only) BPA-free poly­car­bon­ate cups. Accord­ing to the user’s man­u­al, the cups are not tem­per­a­ture resis­tant and may melt and devel­op cracks if used with hot liq­uids. The cups are also not stress-resis­tant and may also crack if often exposed to heavy loads. They often have unscrewed prob­lems after use since they may accu­mu­late extra pres­sure inside the con­tain­er dur­ing the blend­ing. This also may cause the cup to crack. So the qual­i­ty of the poly­car­bon­ate the con­tain­ers are made of is not the best, and this obvi­ous­ly con­tributes to the lim­it­ed dura­bil­i­ty of this machine.

Blades

The unit is equipped with one blade assem­bly, which is attached to the appro­pri­ate cup when need­ed. The assem­bly comes in one piece and is not sup­posed to be dis­as­sem­bled for clean­ing or oth­er pur­pos­es. The blade is made of stain­less steel and is 4 pronged (2 faces upward and 2 down­ward). Although the blade is made of steel, it is report­ed to dull with­in a few months of reg­u­lar use, but replace­ments are eas­i­ly avail­able. The rest of the assem­bly is made of plas­tic, which is weak, and could eas­i­ly break or wear out. The most vul­ner­a­ble part of the assem­bly is the rub­ber ring, and this needs to be replaced more often than desirable.

Special Features

Col­ors: This gad­get is avail­able only in black and sil­ver in gen­er­al, but there are exclu­sive edi­tions for var­i­ous retail­ers in oth­er col­ors that are priced more expen­sive­ly than the black and sil­ver models.

Cer­ti­fied Refur­bished: The refur­bished ver­sion is avail­able for the BL450 mod­el only, which comes with the two cups and 30 recipes book. The refur­bished machine is priced at $20 cheap­er than the orig­i­nal one.

Volt­age sys­tem and use out­side of USA/Canada: The Nutri Nin­ja Pro BL451, BL456, and BL455 is sold in many coun­tries around the world and has a volt­age sys­tem that is rel­e­vant to the par­tic­u­lar region. The machines sold in the USA come with a 110–120 volt­age sys­tem for the USA and Cana­da. So, for reg­u­lar use in coun­tries with a 220–240 volt­age sys­tem, it is bet­ter to buy from local retail­ers. For occa­sion­al use abroad, the blender could be run with a volt­age trans­former. Check here the 220–240 volts mod­els for Nutri Nin­ja Pro BL450, BL451, BL456 sold via UK retailers.

Noise

The Nutri Nin­ja Pro is a noisy machine that pro­duces over 100 deci­bels. To reduce the noise com­ing from the gad­get, the user may put a rub­ber mat under­neath the base unit, which notice­ably damp­ens the sound.

Warranty and Customer Service

These blenders come with only a one-year Lim­it­ed war­ran­ty that means that any repairs and replace­ment parts ship­ment will be sub­ject to extra charges. The user also has the option to buy the var­i­ous extend­ed pro­tec­tion plan from Ama­zon and oth­er retailers.

SharkN­in­ja cus­tomer ser­vice does not have a very good rep­u­ta­tion, and they often try to avoid per­form­ing the war­ran­ty oblig­a­tion. There­fore, buy­ing the unit from rep­utable retail­ers who will per­form the war­ran­ty oblig­a­tion is a rea­son­able solu­tion for poten­tial cus­tomers. The extra pro­tec­tion plan is anoth­er good solu­tion in this situation.

Optional accessories

The major­i­ty of extra acces­sories and parts are not inter­change­able between all Nin­jaShark blenders. How­ev­er, some cups from BL480, BL482, BL482Z mod­els will suit this mod­el. It is also pos­si­ble to buy the replace­ment parts from var­i­ous retail­ers for this machine, such as 

• 24 oz Nin­ja Replace­ment Cups;
• 32 oz Nin­ja Replace­ment Cups;
• Blade Assem­bly;
• Seal­ing Gas­kets.

Set Includes

• 900 Watt Motor Base Unit;
• One Blade Assembly;
• Nutri Nin­ja Cups; 
• Sip and Seal Lids;
• Instruc­tion book;
• Recipe and well­ness guide.

Dimensions

The Nutri Nin­ja Pro BL451, BL456, and BL455 are the per­son­al type blenders that are sup­posed to be com­pact, so they have quite a small base foot­print of 4x4 inch­es, and they are only 14.8 inch­es tall. The unit eas­i­ly fits under any stan­dard kitchen cab­i­net. How­ev­er, with a weight of around 8.2 lbs. these blenders are not very light, so they will be the per­fect com­pact gad­get for a small kitchen but prob­a­bly a bit heavy for tak­ing on travel.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• The Nutri Nin­ja Pro is a pow­er­ful blender that pro­duces decent qual­i­ty drinks and han­dles green smooth­ies with­out any effort.
• This is the only per­son­al type blender in the price range that is able to crush ice with­out liq­uid added to the snow consistency.
• The machine is quite ver­sa­tile and is able to per­form a rea­son­ably good range of tasks for a per­son­al type blender that is priced under $100.

Cons:

• This machine is not durable due to the many designed faults such as hav­ing an all-plas­tic blade to dri­ve con­nec­tion, low-qual­i­ty con­tain­ers, and a quite frag­ile blade rub­ber ring.
• The blender comes with only a 1‑year war­ran­ty and does not have help­ful cus­tomer service.
• This machine, although quite pow­er­ful, is a bit over­priced for a bul­let type blender.

Nutri Ninja Pro BL451/BL455/BL456vBlender Consumer Reviews

The Nutri Nin­ja Pro is a very pop­u­lar blender, with many favor­able reviews from con­sumers. The dura­bil­i­ty prob­lems are not usu­al­ly reflect­ed in the review prob­a­bly. The flashy and pro­fes­sion­al com­mer­cials have the pow­er to influ­ence the con­sumer, and they refuse to notice faults in over­sold products.

Price

The price for these blenders is get­ting low­er over time, and it is nor­mal­ly under a hun­dred dol­lars unless there is a spe­cial offer when you can grab this gad­get at a very attrac­tive price.

Nutri Nin­ja Pro BL456 Blender, via Ama­zon

Summary

This machine does a decent job and pro­duces very good qual­i­ty smooth­ies, includ­ing the green ones. Despite the fact that Nutri Nin­ja Pro BL451/BL455/BL456 is prob­a­bly an over­priced per­son­al blender, how­ev­er, still a good choice for some­one who is look­ing for a sin­gle-serve gad­get to crush ice and blend­ing smooth drinks. Just remem­ber, this is not the most durable machine.

Alter­na­tive­ly, check here our arti­cles the Best pow­er­ful but afford­able per­son­al type’s blenders and NutriBul­let 600 watts Blender vs Nutri Nin­ja Pro BL451/BL455/BL456.