Vitamix 5200

Create every course of your home-cooked meal—from frozen drinks to creamy desserts—in minutes. The Vitamix 5200 is the universal tool for family meals and entertaining.

Create smoothies, hot soups, and frozen desserts with one machine.

64-ounce container is perfect for family meals and entertaining.

Includes cookbook with hundreds of chef-tested recipes.

Your machine is designed and built for outstanding performance and unsurpassed durability. When purchasing a Vitamix, you’ll enjoy:

• Easy-to-use equipment paired with extreme versatility
• The ability to chop, cream, blend, heat, grind, churn, and more, with a single machine
• Quick and easy self-cleaning with a drop of dish soap and warm water; just run on High for 30 seconds
• 7-year full warranty
• Ongoing recipe ideas and community support

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To take this beast on a rigorous test drive, we put it through four tasks: crushing ice; making a frozen strawberry and banana smoothie; whipping up a vegan kale shake; and—since Vitamix says its blenders are so powerful the friction will actually heat liquid in the jar if you run the motor long enough (several minutes at high speed)—a cream of asparagus soup. 

Crushed ice: We dumped in cubes, turned the machine on, and turned the Variable speed up to 10. After 10 seconds, only the bottom inch of cubes were crushed—the ones above that were still whole. We did the same thing again, but this time inserted the tamper to see if we could push all the cubes into the blades. Meanwhile, the machine was loud and it rocked a bit, which was a little scary in something with this much power. After another 20 seconds, the test was a fail: Only the bottom layer of ice was crushed, and that was fused together along the bottom and lower sides of the jar—we had to fill the jar with water to flush the crushed ice out! For failing a task this basic, the 5200 Standard gets an F.

Strawberry-banana smoothie: We threw a cup of frozen strawberries, two bananas, and some milk into the pitcher. We started out on Variable 1, ramped it up to 10, and switched to High. The strawberries got stuck in the blades—we had to use the tamper and some muscle to get everything going. The end results were smooth, but it would have been nicer without having to employ the elbow grease. We would have preferred to turn the machine on and walk away for a minute or two.  Score: C.

Vegan kale shake: We added a 1/2 cup of water to the jar, a 1/2 cup of raw cashews, vanilla, 1/3 cup of whole pitted dates, two bananas, 2 cups of ice cubes, and three stalks of curly kale, stems and all. We started out on Variable 1, increased to 10, then switched to High. After 25 seconds (the time required to make this recipe in our conventional blender), only about a quarter of the jar’s contents had been puréed. We continued blending on High, this time using the tamper to push the ingredients into the blades. The results were good: nicely aerated, with a mousselike texture and a lovely smoothness. Score: B.

Cream of asparagus soup: We followed a recipe from the Vitamix website for simultaneously blending and heating asparagus soup. To the pitcher we added 1 1/4 pounds of cooked asparagus and 1 1/2 cups of cold chicken broth. The temperature in the pitcher was about 78 degrees Fahrenheit when we started. Six minutes later on High, we added a 1/2 cup of cold half-and-half and blended for another 10 seconds. The temperature of the final soup was a steamy 154 degrees Fahrenheit. The heating feature was cool, but we endured a loud six minutes to get there. We could have quickly blended the same ingredients in a standard blender, then transferred the mixture to a pot and heated it up in the same six minutes—plus we could have carried on a conversation without shouting! Score: B.

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