Why You Can Trust CNET Juiceman 3-in-1 Total Juicer review: This three-in-one juicer is stingy with the juice
It might stand in for multiple kitchen gadgets, but the Juiceman 3-in-1 Total Juicer stumbles at what it should do best.
The $120 Juiceman 3-in-1 Total Juicer is designed to handle the work of three separate kitchen appliances: an all-purpose produce juice extractor, a motorized citrus juicer and a travel-sized food blender. Delivering that much versatility is a tall order, and sadly the Total Juicer falls short.
Juiceman 3-in-1 Total Juicer
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
It unlocks less juice from similar products which cost half the price. Its numerous parts are a hassle to deal with and the entire apparatus gets dirty too easily. Instead of the Total Juicer, consider the $300 Omega J8006. While the Omega is pricey and can't blend like the Juiceman, it processes produce like a champ. The elite machine is a snap to clean too and has few components to fuss over. If you're on a budget, the $40 Black & Decker JE2400BD makes more drinkable juice than the Juiceman at a third of the price.
Design and features
If you're familiar with basic centrifugal juice extractors, the Juiceman 3-in-1 Total Juicer, at least in its standard form, won't look out of the ordinary. The machine consists of a heavy cylindrical base that houses an 800-watt electric motor. This engine spins a metal filter basket equipped with sharp blades at its bottom.
The Juiceman 3-in-one Total Juicer comes with lots of parts to tackle many duties.
Rotating at high speed, the basket essentially acts as a cheese grater on overdrive. Its blades both pulverize and liquify fruit and vegetables that land inside of it. Due to its weight, any liquid released in this process is sucked through the mesh strainer by centrifugal force. It then flows through the Juiceman's spout and into a waiting juice cup. Lighter bits, and hopefully pulp smashed free of moisture, are thrown clear of the filter to land inside a waste container.
A clear plastic lid sits over both the filter basket and pulp container. It channels fruit and veg into the juicer via a wide-mouth food chute and provides a path for pulp to enter the collection jar. On the Juiceman's base are a trio of suction cups that anchor the machine to smooth surfaces such as kitchen counters and table tops.
Transform the Juiceman into a dedicated citrus juicer.
What really sets this appliance apart, in theory, is its flexibility. You can remove all of its juice extractor parts -- six in all -- from the Juiceman's base. If you then attach a separate set of four components to the base, the machine transforms into a stand-alone citrus juicer. One piece shifts the motor to a lower gear. Another part, a traditional citrus cone, spins slowly to ream pulp and juice from the halves of round citrus fruit. The other sections include a circular juice strainer, and a cylindrical pulp collector which also has a spout to feed liquid into the juice cup.
Lastly the Juiceman 3-in-1 morphs into a blender thanks to one additional part. This is a blending base complete with its own array of blades. You also use the juice cup as a travel-size blending cup. There's a lid for the cup too so you can grab your drink and take it with you.
Need a personal blender for drinks to go? The Juiceman does that too.
All of those parts give the Juiceman flexibility, but they're also a big drawback. Not counting the motor base, you get a total of 14 parts, mostly plastic. That's an insane number of individual pieces to store and keep track of. Thankfully all these items (except for the base) are dishwasher safe. That's a welcome bonus since the Juiceman, particularly its mesh filter basket, becomes clogged with pulp in short order.
Performance
The machine is an adequate juicer, but far from the best.
Despite its bold name, the Juiceman 3-in-1 Total Juicer isn't terribly good at its primary task: processing produce into something you can drink. This isn't to say the machine can't turn solid fruit into juice, just that it makes less of the stuff than competing centrifugal extractors. For example, the Black & Decker JE2400BD and Hamilton Beach 67601A both pulled liquid out of its raw materials with greater efficiency.
Of all the juicers I've tested, the Juiceman turned in the worst performance I've seen yet. For orange juice, it logged a very low juice extraction percentage of 51 percent (based on the average remaining pulp and the yield of drinkable juice). It also struggled to pull liquid from fibrous kale leaves, earning an unimpressive juice extraction percentage of 27 percent.
When juicing oranges, I consider any extraction percentage approaching 60 percent or higher acceptable from a centrifugal-style juicer. The Black & Decker (59.6) and Hamilton Beach (71.8) were in line with these expectations. Likewise, the quality centrifugal machines I've tested with kale tend to pull moisture from these relatively dry greens with an extraction percentage of around 40 percent. The Black & Decker hit 46 and the Hamilton Beach managed 50.1 percent.
The Juiceman's performance did improve when I switched to processing oranges in the machine's citrus juicer configuration. Oranges from my test batch yielded an average of 104.3 grams of liquid each compared with 66.5 grams (average) run through the Juiceman as a centrifugal extractor. While this is more than the average volume of juice the Black & Decker leached from its test oranges (82 grams), the Hamilton Beach still managed to conjure a greater average: 108.5 grams of OJ.
Conclusion
I respect the motivation to create a product like the $120 Juiceman 3-In-One Total Juicer. From stand mixers, to toasters, to food processors, our kitchens today seem cluttered with specialized appliances that serve only one purpose. Theoretically, a personal blender, universal juice extractor and citrus juicer sounds appealing.
In practice though, it's clear the Juiceman has bitten off more than it can chew. It can't match the produce-processing prowess of cheaper centrifugal extractors. It's also wasteful, making less juice than pricey cold-press juicers. Between its subpar juicing ability and the hassle of tracking, storing and cleaning its many parts, you'll be better served by the efficient and elegant $300 Omega J8006. As a premium cold-press machine, the Omega pulls an astonishing amount of liquid from ingredients with its simple design. Likewise you can get more juice from the same produce using the $40 Black & Decker JE2400BD.