I feel the Jack Lalanne juicer is an average juicer machine. Moreover, according to most other customer juicer reviews, they feel about the same too. Some people will get use out of it and be happy with that. However, they will not know what they are missing until they try a better juicer. Many others will struggle with the Jack Lalanne power juicer and have poor experiences with it or the lackluster customer support several people have reported on. There are already many complaints about the quality of this machine online. I find that alarming. I bought one to try. Now I can see why those experiences could happen even though I have not experienced any large mishaps with the machine myself.
I want to point out a few things first before I discuss my Jack Lalanne juicer review. First, I think Jack Lalanne was awesome. I think he had a wonderful message and he was an inspiring individual. I have bought some of his books and I support his work. With that said, I just don’t like this juicer as much as some of the other ones on the market. I worry a bad experience with it could keep a person from getting healthier. I know I stop using products that don’t work well so I believe other people might do this too. That would be a shame. But I also don’t want to paint a “gloom and doom” portrait of this juicer because it is like I said, average and you can get by with it.
You will probably not see another website about juicers take a whack at this juicer because most do not care. They just want to sell you something. I don’t like that thinking. I hate buying things that are weak and when I buy something that does not work out, I tell my friends not to buy it.
Also, some people are perfectly satisfied with their Jack Lalanne juicer and will disagree with me. That is fine too. This juicer review or report is gauged off my impression, experience, and opinion. I question and compare design and usability as I experience the machines. And I do not always agree with others. When you have tried many juicers, each one makes an impression on you pretty quickly. Some are great and some are not.
The Jack Lalanne juicer is not horrendous by any stretch. It is okay and I think better than no juicer at all. However, Jacks juicer just doesn’t compare in design, manufacturing quality, mechanical efficiency, and maybe customer support. Well-established juicer companies just crush it on all these points. You can do better than the power juicer, the present Juiceman model, or most of the other juicers you find in department stores like Kohls or Bed Bath and Beyond.
Okay, let me point out some observations about the Jack juicer. The juicer does work. At least mine does. When I first tried it out, the motor got stuck and made a horrible high-pitched noise. I turned it off but it has worked fine since then.
The motor spins the centrifugal blade fast enough to juice carrots and apples although not as efficiently as other juicers. I think, 3,600 RPM is underpowered for this juicer. For example, the new Breville JE98XL, which replaces the JE95XL, spins on low speed at 6,500 RPM. That is quite a bit more power than the Lalanne model and this power is helpful when juicing dense vegetables.
The Jack Lalanne juicer motor has a lifetime warranty on it. That is very good because you might need to use it.
When I first pulled the juicer out of the box, the cap popped off the plunger. The glue did not hold the cap on. Why didn’t they just make the plunger all one piece? It is made of cheap hard hollow plastic that will most likely crack if you drop it on the kitchen floor. When compared to the Breville JE95XL plunger, it just doesn't stand out. The Breville juicer is two pieces too but assembled better and sleek in design. Green Star plungers are solid wood or solid plastic, which I prefer.
The overall feel of the materials on Jacks juicer are cheap. The plastic is thin. The metal doesn’t feel particularly solid. The filter basket is flimsy, soft plastic and is not all one piece. It seems like it could come apart easily in a short amount of time. You can see the seams where the basket screens are tacked together. Kind of cheesy I thought. In fact, once I had experienced this juicer and its cheap feel I started to wonder if it was designed cheaply with the idea of needing frequent part replacement and maintenance as part of the business scheme. Parts are easy to find on their nice looking website. But who knows?
Pictures do not show how cheap the plastic is but when you compare it to other juicers, it is noticeable.
The pulp ejector bin does not attach to the juicer well and is a weak design I think. A small lip leads from the juicer into the bin. If you don’t get this connection right, pulp sprays all over the place. Why they didn’t make the lip larger and lock the two items together better, I’ll never know. Just a little thing but it just struck me wrong while using the machine. Other juicer companies have created bigger lips and the pieces fit together nicely allowing no gaps. Look how large the lip on the Breville pulp receptacle bin is.
The fit of the plunger into the juicer chute is horrible. The plunger is not a tight fit at all and rattles around. When you put a carrot into the chute and don’t get the plunger in fast enough, often little pieces of pulp are flung back out the top of the chute. It does not give off a feel of quality.
I think the chute is too large. There is no need to juice a whole apple at once especially if you sacrifice produce to juice yield. While it is fun and fast to grind up an apple that way it still seems like overkill if juicing other items suffers.
The nondrip spout is another advertising point for this juicer. However, it did not work for me. I believe the juicer spout is supposed to lock in an “up” position so it does not drip. I could not figure out how to make the spout stay up so it would not drip. The spout just flops around. I took it apart and tried to figure it out. It made no sense to me how it would work because the small dial doesn't really do anything. It was even recommended to remove the spout for cleaning, which seemed like an added step no one would want to do. Why didn’t they just make the spout part of the juice receptacle like the Breville, Omega or even the old Braun juicers? I have a Braun citrus juicer with an anti-drip spout that snaps up and it works fine. I don’t understand why the Lalanne juicer was not designed like that. The spout design is lame.
The blade needs an extra step to put on and remove. It is unlike any other centrifugal juicer I have seen. The blades on most centrifugal juicers are part of the basket. On the Jack Lalanne juicer, you need to use a special crescent shaped tool to remove the blade for cleaning. This is irritating and it makes no sense to me why it would be designed this way. All other centrifugal juicers just need you to drop the blade with filter basket on top of the motor, lock it and juice away. That is much easier.
Filter basket in the Breville juicers just drops in and locks. No wrench needed. This old Braun juicer works the same way. This is a much easier design to work with.
While the blades on the Jack juicer are sharp and can grind up produce quickly, there seems to be another design problem. The chute end gets close enough to the blade but for some reason much of the produce slips under the chute edge. It does not stay in contact with the blade long enough to juice. The plunger does get close enough to the blade but does not seem to apply enough pressure on the produce to meet the blade. Maybe this is because the plunger doesn't fit tightly in the chute it gives space for the produce to wiggle around and escape juicing. I don't know. I cannot figure it out. It should work better like the Breville does. Some vegetables and fruit pieces are spun around and flung out into the pulp collector before getting juiced. It is inefficient and this is one reason you see such large pieces in the pulp. There is no way to feed this pulp back through the juicer either. It is thrown out again without being juiced. I will say that is typical to all centrifugal juicers though. You cannot really run pulp through any centrifugal juicer twice with much success.
The only semi-work around is to wrap leafy items onto carrots or celery stalks. Then feed them into the blades. With larger pulp chunks you can cut a groove into a celery stalk and fit the pulp chunk of a say a beet into that groove. Then feed it into the juicer. Too much work for me personally when other juicers do it the first time correctly.
The ability of the juicer is average to grind up the produce and produce juice. It does hard vegetables like carrots, beets, celery stalks, and items like that okay. It juices hard fruits like apples all right too. In my experience, it does not juice soft produce like citrus or items like soft berries well. It does not process leafy greens well or anything that might slip under the chute edge where it does not come in solid contact with the blade. So much produce escapes under that chute to blade gap that it is frustrating.
Don’t get me wrong though. You will get juice from almost all of these items. You just won’t get as much as you will from a better designed juicer. The juicer does function. It just doesn’t function as well as others do. And like I mentioned above, if you can combine produce in larger bunches, you might get a little better results.
The advertising claims you get up to 30% more juice using this juicer than other juicers. That was not my experience. The Omega 8003 and Green Star GS-3000 deliver a much more efficient yield of juice to pulp than the Lalanne juicer. (Click on photos to enlarge them.)
My Jack Lalanne power juice deluxe was the least efficient mechanically at getting juice out of the produce. You can see in the picture that it ejected much pulp that was not juiced. There were many large vegetable chunks in the pulp.
You can see how much pulp collects on the basket too. Other juicers will effectively process the pulp so it completely leaves the machine. The pulp ends feeling dry. That is not the case with this juicer. In fairness, most centrifugal juicers collect some larger pulp pieces in their filter baskets and pulp collector bins. It is just not as blatant with them as the amount unprocessed is here.
Here in the picture of the pulp ejector bin you can see the large vegetable pieces that are not being processed and going to be wasted. You cannot put the pulp back through the machine so unless you can do something else with it, it is done. Some other juicers you can juice the pulp several times if you wish but those juicers are usually so efficient the first time, there is no need to reprocess. (Click on juicer Jack Lalanne photos to enlarge them to see more detail.)
The juice quality is okay. There is a fair amount of oxygen whipped up into it but no juicer is immune to that. Even the single auger and twin gear juicers put some oxygen in the juice. Centrifugal juicers create more foam but I feel it is not the end of the world if you drink the juice within a short time after making it. The longer the juice sits the more it degrades so you need to drink it soon. That is true with juice from any type of juicer. Juicing is about the live enzymes. They can work as a indication as to how healthy the juice is. The more oxidation that occurs, the fewer live enzymes survive and possibly the indication that fewer nutrients are present as well. See this 2007 report. It is a little dated now on some things but much of the information is still good.
The Jack Lalanne juicer is not a breeze to clean. I don't like cleaning any juicer but I really don't like cleaning this one. It has big parts with lots of nooks and crannies. Angles are sharp on it as opposed to round. This makes it difficult to get all the pulp out of all the crevices and takes longer to clean. You have to be thorough with a small brush to get it clean.
The pulp collects at all the tight edges of this juicer. The Breville is designed with rounded edges and cleans up much more easily.
The Jack Lalanne juicer is not noisy or loud on its own. It is louder when you are juicing something. All centrifugal juicers are louder. This one runs around 71db without produce in it. It actually runs much quieter than the Breville does, which without produce is about 80db on its low setting. If you want a quiet juicer, look at the Green Star juicers, Omega single augers and the vertical juicers.
Other points that irritated me about the Jack Lalanne juicer again had to do with the quality of materials used in the manufacture of this juicer. The on and off switch is cheap and belongs on a cheaper appliance like a coffeemaker. The power cord is like a lamp cord. None of my other juicers has a cord that cheap and some of them demand even less watts to run.
As you can tell I’m not a big fan of the Jack Lalanne juicer. I think it is faulty. However, that does not mean I would discourage you from getting one used on Ebay for cheap or at a garage sale. If you can find it dirt cheap, snag it. I still believe any juicer is better than no juicer. Anything that will expose you to better health is worth a look-see. If you buy one cheap and enjoy juicing, chances are you will buy a better juicer later. That is how it worked for me.
I will say there are so many better juicers out there than this one and would be a better choice for a beginning juicer. The price isn’t that much more either for the quality you get. The Jack Lalanne Power Juicer Deluxe sells for around $120. For $30 more you can get a Breville JE95XL juicer or their upgraded model the JE98XL, which is essentially the same machine. Those are better machines. For $100 more, you can get a Champion juicer, which features heavy-duty construction and is still good. On the other hand, for the same money as the Champion, around $230, you can get my favorite juicer the Omega 8003. It will juice everything from leafy greens like wheat grass and dense vegetables like carrots.
Therefore, if you are serious about getting a juicer and changing your lifestyle, I suggest you make a more serious choice in the juicer you buy. After all it is you health. Buy a juicer from a company that has spent years refining their machine and not some wickedly marketed contraption like the Jack Lalanne juicer.
A final note: Some general observations I’ve made from my experiences with such products as the Jack Lalanne juicer.
My general experience has been most products you see on a TV infomercial are not worth the money they are asking for it. (Exceptions being that I like the Magic Bullet blender for some uses and I bought the Ronco rotisserie oven. That oven is a surprising effective functioning appliance.)
TV infomercial products tend to be overpriced items that you wouldn’t have even noticed if it weren’t for the hype of the TV advertising. This kind of selling irritates me. I wish they would make a good quality item that is going to last but that isn’t their business model. Most of these items go into your closet or garage until you give it away or trash it. Commonly these products are designed without much thought and made as cheaply as possible. The profit margin worked into the equation is large. It works off a numbers' game as well. If they sell many quickly, they can worry about the backlash later if the product turns out to be bad. The manufacturers know that most people can't be bothered to return the item. And even if the product has a 30-day guarantee, which is crappy, they make you jump through so many hoops to get your money back it will end costing you more depending on how much you value your time.
I put the Jack Lalanne juicer partially into this category but it still baffles me too because it has been around for a long time now. The company making them did not just bail out after a few years of profit. They continue to make an average to mediocre product. I can’t understand why don’t they just redesign the Jack Lalanne juicer, make it excellent, and honor the man it is named after.
