What is the Best Juicer?

So which is the best juicer? There is one simple answer: it’s the one that best meets your expectations and juicing needs…but that doesn’t narrow it down much unless we look at several priorities that people have when choosing. There are several points to consider and it helps to prioritise according to what you definitely need, what you would like, and what is less important. By filtering your choice according to the ‘must have’ features you are more likely to get the juicer that is best for you, because there is no single machine out there that is simply the best for everything. As we drill down into some detail below, there are a few useful links that may help narrow down your selection and you are always welcome to call us on the number at the top of the page for expert personalised advice. At the end of the article we offer links to some ‘best in category’ choices that get our vote.


Best Value Juicer

For fast and convenient access to juicing the most common fruits and vegetables, the Nutri Juicer Cold is the best value model in our range. This model has been awarded the accolade of ‘Best Buy Juicer’ in the Independents ‘Ten Best Juicers’ guide… three times, including most recently in 2016!


Best For Leafy Greens & Wheatgrass

Horizontal Single Auger Juicers are probably the best choice if you need a juicer that is particularly good for leafy greens and wheatgrass and they do a very good job with most other ingredients too. But for almost the same performance a Vertical Slow Juicer will be a bit easier to live with and will actually take a bit less time to use and clean overall. Twin Gear Juicers are also excellent for these ingredients but they are  generally for the real juice enthusiast who doesn’t mind spending more time overall.


Best For Hard Fruits & Vegetables

Centrifugal Juicers and also in particular the Champion Juicer offer the most convenient experience for these ingredients. All the examples in our fruit and vegetable juicers section perform just as well as these two types but they are not quite as fast, so if you want to juice predominantly hard fleshed ingredients the centrifugals and the Champion are the quickest, with Vertical Slow Juicers being almost as quick to use and clean. Vertical Slow Juicers have a slow rotational speed, hence the name but they are by no means slow at processing ingredients because of the large area of the juicing surfaces, which means for every low speed revolution they juice a lot of ingredients.


Best For Soft Fruits

Slow Juicers have revolutionised juicing soft fruits and berries – it used to be very expensive but these give an excellent juice yield with very little waste. These are also great for all other ingredients including leafy greens and wheatgrass. In fact this category is now our best selling type of juicer!


Best For Combatting Ill Health

Most Nutritional Therapists will recommend a Twin Gear Juicer for this – they are a little more complicated to drive but they are accepted to extract more micronutrients than any other type. They take a bit longer to use and clean, but if you are motivated to get the best nutrient extraction you probably won’t find spending a little longer doing your juicing to be that much of a deterrent. For those who prefer a more user friendly juicer, all Masticating Juicers will give a more nutritious juice than the more common centrifugal type.


Best All Rounder (for all ingredients)

Again, Vertical Slow Juicers win hands down for versatility because they juice all of the above mentioned ingredients well and are very convenient and user friendly. This is the type preferred by all the staff at UK Juicers for use at their homes – enough said?


Working Out Your Juicing Priorities

This might seem fairly obvious for most people but surprisingly one persons best juicer could be someone else’s juicing nightmare that spends most of it’s life stuck in a cupboard after purchase. For some, the concept of ‘best’ might equate to most expensive and it’s also surprising how many people use this logic and end up sending back their expensive twin gear model because they are unsuitable for the majority of people. There are many more examples but here are a few aspects of juicer choices to help point you in the right direction.


Juice Yield

When you first think about it, the quantity of juice you get from your ingredients seems a simple enough criteria, until you realise that this very much depends on the type of ingredients you are juicing. You may choose a juicer that gives a very respectable yield on the most common juicing ingredients only to discover that later when you want to juice more leafy greens for example, you’ve ended up with the wrong choice. For general juicing ingredients, which include most firmer fleshed fruits and vegetables, there’s not much difference across the range, say a maximum 5-10% variation in most cases, but with trickier ingredients the differences can grow to the extent that there is a significant difference in the cost of ingredients used. Hopefully the above links will help you narrow down choices that give a good yield for your preferred juicing style. As a rule of thumb, remember that centrifugal juicers and the Champion juicer don’t perform as well as other types on soft fruits, leafy greens and wheatgrass. Also if you want to juice a lot of fruits, we probably wouldn’t recommend going for a Twin Gear Juicer as the process with these ingredients is a bit too laborious for most people. For that reason, Twin Gear models are perhaps a more optimal  choice for juicing mainly vegetables, leafy greens and wheatgrass, and for people who are using juicing as part of a nutritional therapy – because they take longer to use.


Ease of Use

There’s nothing really challenging about using any of our juicers but some do take a little more getting used to than others. Centrifugals  are the commonest format and these are pretty intuitive and easy to assemble and use. Most don’t require further adjustments once they are assembled but some masticating juicers do offer a range of pulp pressure adjustments. This means you can set the force used to press the juice, so for example fibrous ingredients might require a high pulp pressure while soft berries need less. This isn’t really that difficult to figure out but it is one extra thing to do if you prefer a ‘set it and forget it’ approach. In terms of ease of use, starting with the easiest, the pecking order is Centrifugal Juicers (plus the rather unique Champion Juicer), followed closely by Vertical Slow Juicers, then Single Auger Juicers and finally the most complicated are Twin Gear Juicers. If you are a motivated juice enthusiast, then even the Twin Gear Juicers shouldn’t present much of a problem if you are happy to trade a little time for a little extra nutrition.


Ease Of Cleaning

This is one of the most common factors that people are concerned about. Most of our juicers have dishwasher safe parts and at first glance that seems like a huge plus. However, in any juicer the filter screen that separates the juice from the pulp is unlikely to come properly clean in a dishwasher. This is because fibres tend to get lodged in the little holes, so you will usually need to spend time cleaning this part by hand. Number of parts to clean and how fiddly they are also plays into this, especially if you don’t have a dishwasher. Slow juicers with ‘juice valves’ allow you to do most of the clean up before you disassemble them, by operating them with water in the juice bowl at the end of a juicing session. These would get our vote for easy cleaning, followed by centrifugal juicers. (Centrifugal juicers generally have fewer parts but the larger screens with more holes can take a bit longer to clean). Next it’s single auger juicers, because some of the angular parts are a bit fiddly to clean and after these the least easy to clean are twin gear models. Sadly we have no self-cleaning juicers but even with the twin gear models it shouldn’t take longer than a few minutes for clean up, so don’t be disheartened!


Price

Budget is a pretty obvious consideration for many people and all our juicer pages can be sorted according to price. We don’t sell ‘cheap’ juicers because time and again we have found the old adage ‘buy cheap and buy twice’ to be true. We’ve tested a lot of sub £100 fruit and vegetable juicers over the years and we’ve almost always found them wanting, often with very poor juice yields. We also advise customers to beware of cheap Chinese knock offs, particularly when it comes to choosing a slow juicer as these are generally poor quality machines with dismal performance. Value for money is something we very much believe in and all our juicers have been rigorously tested and are supported by good warranties (and our legendary customer service!) should anything ever go wrong.


Footprint

If you are really short on worktop space you might not want one of the larger horizontal format juicers as some of them will hog too much of your kitchen real estate. If they are within your budget, vertical format slow juicers take up the least counter space and they are also our most versatile juicers. Actually this type is the least likely to disappoint as people become more advanced in their juicing adventures, because slow juicers do a good job of ALL ingredients. After slow juicers, centrifugal models have a bit bigger footprint, followed by all the horizontal format juicers, with Green Star Juicers being the biggest. Please do be aware of the Chinese knock off slow juicers being marketed by some businesses. These models are often promoted under a single (less well known) brand name and often compare themselves to the original brands they are ripping off to try and capture their customers – if you end up with one of these, performance can be really disappointing.

We promote juicers because we love juicing ourselves and our company was founded on direct experience of the benefits of this healthy lifestyle choice. We want our customers to end up with a choice that works well and encourages you to make juicing a daily habit. Cheap juicers will be the first entry point for a lot of people and it’s quite sad how many are put off juicing altogether by the poor experience they have using these machines. Better to save up and choose a model that will be efficient, reliable, durable and user friendly.


Weight

Some of our more powerful induction motored juicers can weigh a good few kilos. That’s no problem if the juicer stays out on the counter ready for use and we do encourage this. But if you need to lift it in and out of a cupboard frequently, the weight of the juicer and whether it has easy lifting points or handles may be a consideration, paticularly for some elderly or disabled users. All our juicers have the weight in the technical specifications sections of the product pages.


Additional Functions

Many of our juicers have additional functions, especially masticating juicers. There are quite a few that have either a blank screen to allow the juicer to puree or grind ingredients, or some other way of homogenizing like the ‘froothie’ disc for making smoothies with the Sage Nutri Juicer range. In the case of masticating models the grinding feature can be quite useful for homemade nut butters and frozen fruit desserts – but only if you are likely to actually use it!

In the majority of cases we find that people in the UK generally don’t bother with using these additional parts, so you might want to give these extra features a lower priority unless you are sure you will use them – more is not always better. We would sound a particular note of caution about the ability of juicers with homogenizing features to make smoothies. Some brands do market the ability to make smoothies as an additional selling point. No juicer has ever made a smoothie with the same silky texture that you get from a high speed blender. We love smoothies and to enjoy these at their best, we recommend that you use a blender because the smoothie functions of most juicers just aren’t going to give you decent results. Hurom models have added a smoothie lever to their latest slow juicers, so the user can allow more pulp into the drink. This is a non-feature in our opinion, because one reason for juicing in the first place is to get a drink that is easily digested – this is when most of the pulp has been removed. We would never consider using a juicer to try and make a smoothie – they just don’t do it well enough compared to a blender.


Does It Juice Wheatgrass?

We get asked this a lot. Many people have heard about the benefits of the true superfood, wheatgrass juice. What most people don’t realize is the work involved in growing and juicing it, so for some it is a passing interest while a dedicated few make it a big part of their juicing regime. It takes a lot of wheatgrass to make a small shot of juice. The best wheatgrass juicers are often less good for juicing fruits on their own. If you want the possibility of decent performance on wheatgrass in case you need it in future, but you don’t want to compromise on ease of use for other ingredients, this is another area where slow juicers excel. Generally the best wheatgrassers for most people would be Horizontal Single Auger Juicers, but Vertical Slow Juicers and Twin Gear Juicers are excellent for this too.


Why Buy From Us?

Here at UK Juicers we are all juicing enthusiasts and we test most of the well known juicers that hit the UK market. We only select juicers that provide good value for money (hence we don’t sell cheap Chinese knock offs) and good juice yields. If you come to us for advice we will try to determine your juicing priorities and direct you to the model most suitable to your needs. We are truly independent and not tied to any single manufacturer so we pride ourselves on helping our customers get the right machine for them rather than selling a particular model. Most importantly, our service and after sales support is second to none, we carry a full range of spares, and we love having happy customers!


Our ‘Best In Category’ Juicers

Best Value Centrifugal Juicer – The Nutri Juicer Cold

Best Overall Masticating Juicer – The Kuvings EVO820 Whole Slow Juicer

Best Premium Centrifugal Juicer – The Nutri Juicer Cold XL

Best Value Single Auger Juicer – The Omega 8006 Nutrition Centre

Best Premium Single Auger Juicer – The Omega NC900HDSS Stainless

Best Value Slow Juicer – The Omega Vert VRT350HD

Best Premium Slow Juicer – The Kuvings EVO820

Best Twin Gear Juicer – The Green Star Elite Juicer

Best Value Manual Citrus Juicer – The Restaurant Pro

Best Premium Manual Citrus Juicer – The Nutripress™

For even more information on juicer types and features see our Choosing Your Juicer Page