The blurb
Natural Blender wants to ‘help people make healthy choices by providing exciting, fresh ingredients’ for smoothies and removing the waste, expense and fuss of buying all the bits and pieces yourself. It all began when the founder, Charles, decided to make life easier for people who, like him, were thwarted in their efforts to shop for exotic superfoods such as camu camu powder and Ecuadorian goji berries—Natural Blender crafts new smoothie recipes and sources all those unusual ingredients so you don’t have to.
Why smoothies? As they say: ‘Unlike juicing, blending retains the pulp and the full nutritional value of the ingredients, keeping fibre and other nutrients that would otherwise be chucked away. Our recipes are thicker and will keep you fuller for longer (hello beach bodies!), balancing the natural sugars to keep your insulin levels steady. We think they taste better too!’
The process
The Natural Blender box delivery teased my impatient anticipation, eager to get started. They are delivered on Saturdays for convenience, and the first thing that struck me when mine arrived was how well packed and packaged everything was—the neat little envelope of superfoods, the clear labels for each item, the sleek bottle to carry your smoothie around in (unused in my case, as it turned out, because I finished the, err, double portions in one sitting each). All this care and attention to detail engenders confidence, as do the smart, pretty recipe cards for the week, with their colourful photos of each smoothie on the front and backs full of instructions and interesting facts.
I got started on the first smoothie of the week, the Lemon Cooler—the five recipes you get are labelled with an order of consumption on their recipe cards; less important if you make them all in a two or three-day binge, but relevant if you stretch them over the week to ensure you use the short-lived ingredients first.
All you need to make the recipes up is a blender and water or ice—everything else is provided, ready in the correct amounts. It’s not completely foolproof (I was overenthusiastic with my first recipe’s lemon, citrus-lovingly scraping pulp out of its limp shell with a spoon) but as close as. One note for people with Nutribullets or similar bottom-loading blenders: do the steps backwards, ice and hard ingredients first and moving down to the softer items, to imitate the distribution they recommend in order to extend the lifespan of your blender (ie so the blades don’t have to cut a wall of ice from a standing start).
The recipes were all tasty, though my favourites by a length were Tropi-Kale, a surprisingly zingy mix of kale, courgette, apple, grapes and coconut water with added flaxseeds and cinnamon, and Let It Glow, a blend of sweet potato, orange, pineapple, sunflower seeds and lucuma powder.
The recipe cards are full of interesting tidbits on top of the instructions and nutritional information; Let It Glow, for example, is aimed at boosting skin health, thanks to vitamins A and C from the orange, pineapple and (indirectly) sweet potato and omegas 3 and 6 from the sunflower seeds. Lucuma is an added bonus, a good vegetarian source of the niacin that is more often obtained from meat, which ‘aids digestion, muscle development, and helps regulate stress and hormones’.
The result
After a week (or five days—the boxes come with five recipes, each enough to make two smoothie servings, which you are likely to drink the same day) I was feeling more energetic and generally healthy. Perhaps it was partly looking forward to trying the new recipe each morning, but I found waking up a lot easier, and felt far less affected by my usual afternoon energy slump.
Additionally, my complexion did indeed seem to ‘glow’ more from all the vitamin/nutrient-dosing—an effect that continued beyond the end of the week. As and when the company expands in the future (as they surely will) I can imagine them offering priority-focused boxes options, such as smoothies for skin, recipes for illness recovery, work-out blends.
There’s no doubt that there are benefits to drinking these smoothies, both for their primary ingredients and for the miscellaneous superfoods smuggled into them to up the ante… and it’s just so easy. No hassle measuring things out, dragging pineapples back from the market, putting in the hours online to seek out the various powders and seeds—I’m sold. Without a doubt I’ll be returning to Natural Blender, both for a personal boost and also in order to gift subscriptions to family and friends. The simplicity and nutritiousness, bundled in glossy sophistication, make for a recipe even the most hardened smoothie philistines would take a second look at.
