Review by Ed Osworth:

I juce at least once a day as I primarily eat raw foods.

My Jack LaLane juicer finally wore out after 2.5 years of daily use. I was tempted to buy another – but I liked the way everything including the pulp catcher is all in one unit. So glad I got the Breville.

This thing is POWERFUL, especially compared to “Jack LaLanne”. It is so powerful I usually don’t even use the pusher except to cover the top so your ceiling doesn’t get covered with stuff. Other reviewers have mentioned that tendency. What wasn’t mentioned is that the reason it does that is because the motor is so beefy that stuff will shoot straight up.

When juicing soft stuff I immediately cover the top with my hand.

The design of this thing is absolutely first rate. Even down to the plug, which has a moulded loop so that it is easy to unplug and plug in! No tool is required to remove the basket, as in most other juicers. Breville uses a combo of ingenious design and magnets to hold it in place!

Ease of use and fit and finish is perfect.

Clean up is really a 2 minute operation and I don’t even own a dishwasher. It will stain eventually, as every juicer I have ever owned does. Carrot juice would make a great dye

The pulp on this juicer is a bit wetter than the Jack LaLanne. The “Jack” had a much larger basket and a much slower rotation. I believe that may account for it. But it isn’t much wetter – just very slightly.

This juicer makes much smaller pieces of pulp though – and my experience so far has been that it gets just as much juice from a pound of carrots.

Bottom line – I can’t imagine anyone not loving this unit.

Review by N. Marker:

This juicer rocks!!

Been using it for two weeks, works better than advertised.

Solid piece of engineering, sturdy long lasting parts, excellent workmanship.

Best features are its simplicity and ease of cleaning.

Though named “Compact” the unit is pretty large.

The 700 HP motor is powerful and not too loud. Pulp container is of decent capacity. Do not expect to juice entire apples, unless you are using very small apples.

The pulp extract is pretty dry so you are getting almost all the juice out of the fruit/vegetables with this unit.

Nothing better than fresh juice and this juicer makes the whole experience a breeze.

Would highly recommend it to anyone looking for easy maintenance good long lasting juicer .

Review by Robert Thomas:

We just bought this juicer on Amazon, using the discount and the free shipping. Made it the best price on the internet when we bought it first of December 2005. Before commenting on the juicer, let me tell you what we used before this juicer arrived.

We have a top of the line Green Power juicer. If you know juicers, you know this is one of the best. We’ve been juicing with it on a daily basis for 10 years and it is still going strong. It has a high juice yield (dry pulp), can juice grasses and greens efficiently (wheatgrass, parsley, spinach etc.), and low temperatures and rpm minimize oxidation so juice lasts a long time. Other advantages are claimed, but these are the biggest for us.

A well-known downside to twin-screw type juicers like the Green Power is that it takes quite a bit of force to push items like carrots into the juicer, because there is no cutting blade action, just the gripping/squeezing action of the twin screws. Frankly, after 10 years of pushing hard on this thing, we’ve gotten tired of it, even though it makes great juice. We also don’t like the 1.5″ square opening which requires us to cut up apples and large carrots before feeding them. Cleanup isn’t too bad, but not great either. I decided to buy a juicer that would make good juice in reasonably high yields but with emphasis on speed and ease of use. My intent was that this juicer would complement but not replace the Green Power.

Well, after doing a lot of research and reading the reviews here and elsewhere, I decided to buy the Breville 800JEXL Juice Fountain Elite. The most attractive claims for this juicer were the fast juicing speed, relatively easy cleanup, and the widemouth (3″ round) opening. The stainless steel exterior was also a plus, as the Green Power’s white plastic parts became stained long ago (vegetable juices can do that!).

The biggest concern with this juicer was the limited warranty period (1-3 years) compared to other juicers in its class (which go as high as 15 years). Phone discussion with a vendor indicated concerns about the lifetime of the motor, though his experience was not with the Elite, which has a new, more powerful motor. I also had some concerns about how efficiently it would extract juice compared to our Green Power, how it would work on spinach and other leafy vegetables, and whether the juice would stay fresh as long.

Though I’d have preferred a better warranty, I decided the features were attractive enough to try it. It is a lot of money to throw away if it fails just after the warranty. But if the ease of juicing was as good as claimed, it would almost be worth it!

The new juicer arrived a few days ago. It was simple to put together. The instructions were clearly written. After washing the parts in the dishwasher (yes, they are dishwasher proof), my wife and I proceeded to make one of our standards, carrot-apple-celery. Boy, were we blown away! This juicer met our expectations and more!

Our apples were large, so we had to quarter them despite the 3″ opening. However, in the Green Power we have to cut them into 9 pieces, requiring 4 knife cuts instead of 2 for the Juice Fountain. The apples fed into the juicer easily and very rapidly. Apples feed into the Green Power without too much force, but can be hard to feed because of the pulp they generate (you make apple sauce in the screw feed area and it backs up the chute). We usually use Granny Smiths to minimize that problem on the Green Power, but the Juice Fountain had no problem at all, so I tried some Galas and they also fed in beautifully. In the Green Power, you have to alternate carrots with soft fruits to avoid stalling the screw conveying action; there was no such need with the Juice Fountain. For ease of feeding pulp-producing or juicy fruits and vegetables, I give the Juice Fountain an “A+” compared to the Green Power a “C”.

We then fed in the celery. In the Green Power, celery strings wrap around the end of the screws and plug the end plug. The cutting/centrifugal juicing mechanism of the Juice Fountain eliminates such issues completely. The celery fed in very easily and produced plenty of juice. In the Green Power, celery that is small or somewhat old (limp) can be hard to feed into the chute since the stalks don’t feed into the screw that easily and the plastic crammer tends to jam them in the chute rather than push them into the screws. In the Juice Fountain, celery of all sizes, including tips and leaves, fed in easily. For ease of handling fibrous vegetables or long, flexible vegetables, I give the Juice Fountain an A+ and the Green Power a B.

Already by this time I knew the Juice Fountain really does make juice fast! I couldn’t wait to try the carrots. We put them in whole (minus the cut off tops) and for smaller ones, in bunches of 2 or 3. They just zipped into the juicer! The instruction manual says that juice yield is higher if you feed them slowly, so we didn’t push the limits of feed speed, but suffice it to say, it was MUCH faster than the Green Power, on the order of just a few seconds. Furthermore, there was almost no force required to push the carrots in, a welcome change from the 2-handed, “lean your body weight into it” effort required on the Green Power. What a delight this was! For speed of juicing, we give the Juice Fountain an A+ and the Green Power a C. For ease of feeding, we give the Juice Fountain an A+ and the Green Power a D.

We were having so much fun we grabbed more carrots and shoved them in, and then disaster happened! With the juicer still outputting juice, the juice container (pitcher) overflowed and bright orange carrot juice poured out over the countertops and down the face of our painted white cabinets, staining them orange. We were having so much fun juicing, and it was happening so quickly compared to the Green Power, that we didn’t realize how much juice we had made in so short a time! Had we been using the Green Power, we’d just be getting started. Oh well. We hit the well-marked red STOP button on the front of the juicer, then sponged up the mess, using 409 cleaner to get the orange stains off the cabinets. The stainless steel Juice Fountain Elite cleaned up easily.

We emptied the pitcher and then finished our juicing, making mental note to remember how rapidly this thing produces juice and to not exceed the pitcher’s MAX level marking in the future.

What about noise during juicing? Many have suggested that the Juice Fountain is noisy. My wife and I didn’t find it so at all. We have a flour mill that sounds like a jet plane! We have a Vitamix blender that makes a racket (on highest speed). By comparison, this juicer is quiet. Not as quiet as the Green Power, but not at all annoying. For noise, we’d give the Juice Fountain a B and the Green Power an A, with a Vitamix blender a D and our grain mill an F (requiring ear plugs).

Now for the taste test. The defrother on the pitcher seems to work OK. The juice was excellent, not oxidized tasting in comparison to juice from the Green Power. In fact, maybe it was my imagination, but I think it tasted fresher. The Green Power may use lower speed and incorporate less air, but because it takes so long to make the juice, by the time you are finished, the first part of the batch may be 20 minutes old. With the Juice Fountain, it may be just a couple minutes old. For taste, I give the Juice Fountain an A+, the Green Power an A.

We dislike pulp in our vegetable juices. With the Green Power, the amount of pulp in the juice is not bad, but we still have to strain it through a wire screen strainer to get pulp-free juice. With carrot-Granny Smith apple-celery, a quart of juice will leave at least 2-3 tablespoons of pulp in the strainer. By contrast, the Juice Fountain juice was virtually pulp-free. We didn’t bother straining it, there was so little. This is great, since wire screens tend to plug and back-up, and are a pain to keep clean. Yet another time saver for both juice production and clean-up! For pulp-free juice, Juice Fountain merits an A+ and Green Power gets a B.

OK. What about juicing efficiency? I don’t have any hard numbers on this, but the pulp felt about as dry as that from the Green Power. That suggests that the efficiency was similar. The Green Power is claimed to have one of the highest extraction efficiencies of any juicer on the market, short of the Walker or other press-type juicers. That seems to be a fair claim. However, actual practice may vary. The dryness of pulp in the Green Power is controlled by how far you screw in the end plug, which creates back pressure and controls the pulp flow rate. If you screw it all the way in, you get very dry pulp. However, the juicer feeds poorly, and if you have anything like apples you’ll just backup the pulp into the chute and the screw won’t be able to generate enough pumping pressure to overcome the backpressure of the plug. Thus, in practice, we kept the end plug of our Green Power screwed out about a half turn. This resulted in better screw feed action but somewhat wetter pulp. Some Green Power users will push the pulp through a second time to get higher yields, but we didn’t bother. By comparison, the Juice Fountain seems to make pulp of similar dryness to what we were getting on the Green Power, but without having to mess with optimum end plug settings, screw backups, or feeding pulp through a second time. Thus, I give both Green Power and Juice Fountain an A for efficiency, but the Juice Fountain gets there more easily. Perhaps in the future I’ll do a more quantitative comparison.

Cleanup was a breeze. I just rinsed all the top parts off and put them in a drying rack or the dishwasher. The wire mesh and cutting blades were easily cleaned with the supplied brush. I found cleanup easier and faster than with the Green Power. The Green Power has mostly plastic parts, and these are stained with vegetable juice stains which don’t disappear with any of the manufacturer’s recommended treatments. I anticipate no such problems from the Juice Fountain’s stainless steel parts. The plastic on the Juice Fountain is not in places where stains are expected to build up (the pulp container or pitcher). The elimination of wire screen straining further eased cleanup. For ease and speed of cleanup, I give the Juice Fountain an “A” and the Green Power a “B”.

A few comments on durability. One drawback of many product reviews on Amazon is the limited experience of reviewers with the equipment. Don’t you just love those reviews that read, “I just bought Product XYZ and used it for a week and it is fabulous!!!”? I wish we had more reviews from longterm users. Thus, I wasn’t going to write a review on this juicer until I’d used it at least for several months. However, I was so impressed by this juicer I just had to write now! I felt like I already had enough hard facts to compare with a top-of-the-line competitor that some of you would appreciate reading my comparisons.

Nevertheless, the big question on this machine is the limited warranty. I’m hoping that durability won’t prove to be the Achille’s heel of this machine. Discussions with vendors suggest that the motor is the critical part that may fail, so I’ll be watching it, hoping that it outlasts the warranty, and that the new, more powerful motor in the Elite will prove durable. Warranties aren’t everything, though. The Green Power had a 5 year warranty. The motor is robust and going strong after 10 years of almost daily use. However, the plastic parts on the Green Power seem inadequately designed for the high stresses placed on them in an extrusion device. We saw stress-cracking of the front piece within the first few years (which we eventually had to replace when the cracks propagated to the failure point). Stress-cracking is also visible in the main screw housing. Other plastic failures include partial separation of the feed crammer halves (so that pulp gets stuck inside the hollow crammer), chipping of the hopper tray so that it doesn’t seat snugly, breakage of the plastic cross-piece on the base that the pitcher tray fits over, and stress-fracture leading to failure of one of the plastic knurled knobs used to tighten the chamber assembly.

By contrast, the Juice Fountain’s stainless steel bowl assembly shouldn’t fail unless I severely dent it. The wire screen/cutting assembly will probably need periodic replacement, I’m guessing. The housing lid and feed chute are plastic (looks like polycarbonate) and may eventually chip if dropped, but look stronger than the highly mineral filled plastic of the Green Power. The pitcher is plastic, which some people would not like as much as the glass of the Green Power, but at least it won’t break as easily (we had to replace our Green Power pitcher once). If you prefer glass, you could use a glass container instead on the Juice Fountain without a problem except increase risk of splashing and no defoamer. Overall, I think the housing of the Juice Fountain will hold up very well compared to the Green Power. Thus, the only big question mark for me is the motor, and I am hoping that the short warranty is not a reflection of issues in that department. Stay tuned.

The other issue is the ability to juice grasses and leafy greens. I am planning to keep the Green Power because I don’t expect this juicer to do a great job on those. We often don’t include those in our juices, however, so it will be worth it to have this extra juicer for the many times when we don’t need the other capabilities. I expect it to juice spinach OK, but probably not with as good an efficiency. However, I will withhold comments until I can do quantitative tests, which I may report later.

CONCLUSION– I love this juicer. It is every bit as fast as the manufacturer claims. It is easy to use and clean up. It makes great tasting juice at high yields. It compares very favorably with a more expensive, top-of-the-line Green Power juicer. The biggest concern is the limited warranty, but I’m having so much fun with this juicer that I would probably buy another one even if it failed just after the warranty period.

The above comparisons are somewhat “apples vs. oranges”. It might be more fair to compare this to other centrifugal juicers. Some of the advantages in ease-of-use would pertain to other centrifugal juicers when compared to the Green Power. But I think the 3″ mouth, the high rpm, and the stainless steel housing are worth considering. I can’t compare to other centrifugal juicers, but the Juice Fountain does compare very well with the top notch Green Power juicer.

This juicer saves so much time and effort, I will probably suffer any juicing inefficiencies that may arise with spinach and such rather than bother with the Green Power. I’ll probably put the Green Power on a high shelf and pull it down only when doing grasses, which I rarely use.

Sorry about the length of this review, but hopefully you’ll find the comparisons helpful.

Review by Chris:

I used an Omega 1000 for 7 years. The Omega would often get out of balance (you have to stop juicing, disassemble, clean and start over), has a small feed chute and at times would “spray” some juice from the spout.

The Breville 800 has the following great features:

Big feed chute. You can process 3 regular size carrots at once or three medium apples or oranges (stacked in the feed chute). No cutting needed. The chute is 3″ in Dia and 7″ tall.

Disassembles quickly. No screws. Fits easily in the dishwasher.

The pitcher included has a spout opening, so there’s no overspray. Additionally, the lid is made to separate the foam from the juice.

Never gets out of balance because it’s and ejection style juicer. It still does a great job of extracting the majority of juice with the high rpm motor.

Last, it looks very nice on the counter with the stainless steel construction.

Review by fan of quality products:

After my flimsy Juiceman Junior finally went to small appliance heaven, I decided to look around for a machine that I can actually live with = use it without hating to clean the thing afterwards. I’d never heard of Breville before, but the solid 5-star rating caught my eye. The idea of a wide enough feeder tube so I don’t have to spend so much prep time was enticing, but what made me decide to buy the machine (cheaper some other place, look around) were the high marks on cleanup and performance. – Usually I don’t write a review right away, but this juicer simply blew me away. What a beautiful piece of well thought-through craftmanship! Being German, I certainly prefer lasting performance over flimsy throw-away items, and this machine looks and feels like it will stand the test of time. I don’t find the motor any louder than my previous machine, so that’s not a problem. One reviewer wrote to put a damp paper towel around the pulp catcher rim to prevent tiny bits of pulp from flying out. I still had few tiny escapees, probably because I didn’t do it right, but one quick wipe took care of it. Cleanup is indeed almost a joy compared to other machines. The mesh screen is build solidly, no plastic parts to wear out where it counts. This machine is worth every penny and then some, and I thank all previous reviewers for having helped me select such a wonderful piece of kitchen equipment!

Review by J. A. Smith:

I got this machine as a birthday present and am over the moon about it. I’ve made some wonderful juices…papaya/apple, apple/carrot/ginger, and citrus mix. Anything I put in is thoroughly juiced…very little moisture is left in the pulp container. It is loud but this doesn’t bother me at all. I do find that I have to cut the fruit into smaller wedges…whole apples, in spite of what’s advertised on the box, do NOT fit down the spout. Still, a very minor point. I highly recommend this machine…for the price, you can’t beat it. And clean-up takes all of 5 minutes if you’re thorough. Even comes with its own scrub brush.

Review by MW:

We owned a refurbished Waring JEX328 juicer for about two years and my wife used it to make juice for our children and me almost every day. It held up fairly well and we paid almost nothing for it at the time (around 30 bucks, I think), but it finally cratered a couple of weeks ago. We debated for a while whether or not to replace it with this Breville model or the Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Pro. We finally decided on this one because it had so many five star ratings and because it is an appliance we use so often, thus we thought it made sense to get the best one we could find, even with its steeper price. While I can’t compare it to the Hamilton Beach model, I can compare it to the Waring model, and it beats the Waring model hands down.

As soon as you unpack the Breville you know you have a top quality piece of equipment. It does an outstanding job at juice extraction (the pulp is dryer than what the Waring produced, and the Waring actually did pretty well) and the clean-up is far easier. When cleaning the Waring, you had pulp caked up within the machine itself and it was a pain to clean it out, partially becaused it had a higher moisture content but also simply because of all of the nooks and crannies in this catchment section of the juicer. Although this section detached, it was still difficult to clean nonetheless . The Breville puts the pulp in a separate container off to the side, and as others have mentioned, if you line it with a plastic bag there is nothing to it. The only “pain” is cleaing the filter device, which is going to be difficult with any juicer you buy. The brush they provide does make this a little easier, however.

Now for the biggest difference: the noise produced when the machine is turned on. With the Waring, you had to pause the television, stop talking, cover your ears, and hope the neighbors didn’t phone the cops on you for disturbing the peace. The Breville is FAR quieter. Don’t get me wrong, it is not “whisper quiet” or anything like that, but it probably makes one third of the noise the Waring did.

Is it worth the higher price as compared to the Waring or Hamilton Beach? Hard to say. Like I mentioned, we got the Waring for practically nothing and it was a good introductory machine for us for juicing, but SO LOUD!

I can’t really find any flaws with the Breville at all (we have run it for about a week now). Considering, however, that it costs almost three times what you can get the Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Pro for (I would chose this one over the Waring purely from my experience with it and from reading the reviews for the Hamilton), whether or not you want to go with this “ultra juicer” version boils down to sheer personal preference. How often you will run it and what variety of recipies you might want to put through it should probably be your driving factors, along side the price difference, of course. The main differences I found with the Breville as compared to the Hamilton were a slightly higher wattage (900 versus 800) and the variable speeds instead of only one, single speed. From our perspective, though, we have had no regrets in spending the extra cash for this top model.

EDIT 08/05/08: Just thought I would mention that since this review we bought the Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Pro as a gift for my wife’s mother, so we had a chance to directly compare it to the Breville. It did a good job, but it was louder and not nearly as solidly built as the Breville. After this comparision, we are even more satisfied with our decision to spend a bit extra and get this model. The varible speed on the Breville is something you will definitely miss should you go back to a model that does not have this feature. Hope this helps!

Review by Cyborg:

Breville BJE510 was nominated Australian Design Award and it deserves it indeed.

Built very well with outstanding attention to detail, solid stainless steel feed chute, thick and mirror finished acrylic parts that do not have difficult to wash nooks. Juicing carrots left no stains and washing with paper towel and few drops of mild detergent took about 3 minutes for acrylic parts and 5 minutes for the basket with help of soft brush. Locking bar is solid metal with safety – motor will not start if bar is not raised to lock position to prevent any accidental startup. Speed dial has solid feel and digital info display is very cool looking. After choosing speed the power requirement is automatically adjusting according to load. Unit is slightly heavy yet within a reason. Cutter assembly has simple yet solid lock and is easy to remove – no more pulling apart stuck cutter basket and motor base wondering when you are finally going to break it. Pulp from veggies comes out with little moisture and not dripping wet, so efficiency appears to be quite good. Amazon shipping came in double carton and manufacturer also uses very thick padding therefore no problem with shipping and no damage of any kind. In one sentence, this juicer is practically designed, works very well and looks good.

Review by F. Fung:

I have tried the Jack LaLanne Power juicer, the Breville JE900 (previous model) and this model. By far this one is the best one! First of all, the Jack LaLanne Power juicer had less power than the Breville series, and also the metal mesh screen had bigger holes. So a lot of the times, the juice produced wasn’t really smooth. Because it was white it stained easily if you make a lot of carrot juice. Also, cleanup was more work because you have to unscrew the juicing blade every time for a cleanup.Now onto the Breville series. Quick and easy cleanup, fine mesh screen so the juice is much more smoother, and more power! What makes the JE95XL better than the JE900 is mainly the two speed control. With the JE900, it was so powerful and fast all the time that when I juiced soft fruits like grapes and strawberries, the fruit wouldn’t be juiced all the way. Sometimes, I find half-juiced grapes in the pulp container. So I got a lot less juice with the softer fruits. Also, once you turn it on, it goes full blast! So the juicer would move around on my counter.With the JE95XL, the speed control allows me to use lower speeds for the softer fruits, and also they changed the motor so that once you turn it on, it starts slow than ramps up. This way the juicer doesn’t move around when you turn it on. Also, the pitcher has a better lid, that allows you to keep the lid on while you’re juicing. By far, this unit is the best juicer I’ve used.

Review by M. Savoie:

OK I got this juicer just as soon as it came out. I read all the reviews of all the juicers I could find, and it was clear that Breville was the best way to go. And the raves were all about the previous model which had less power and only one speed. I love the juicer but I guess I was expecting a divine product by the review I read. I’ll just say it is good quality without drooling all over about it…PRO’S:
~Great Power
~easy to clean, (do it sooner rather than let stuff dry on)~smartly designed electrical plug
~motor cannot run if parts are not locked together (for safety reasons)
~product has few angles and many curves, which makes cleaning easier since pulp/juice can be hard to reach where there are corners
~two speeds: fast for power, slow for soft items
~it really can make 8oz juice in 5 seconds!
~huge food chute can accomodate an entire apple… you save time not needing to cut many things pre-juicing.CON’S:
~tomatoes – even on slow setting, the juicer doesn’t effeciently grab all the juice of a tomato. perhaps do tomatoes first, then recycle the ‘pulp’ back through juicer to get more juice
~even though the plastic is durable and dark colored (to distract against discoloration) carrots do tend to stain it immediately.The con’s are really quite trivial but I thought I should mention them since I was expecting pure perfection based on the reviews I read. I love the product and I would not swap it for anything. Besides, it is extremely affordable for what you get out of it!

Review by Anjana Nigam:

This reconditioned juicer works well and provides a speedy glass of juice in seconds. It’s got a satin nickel finish which also looks good on my countertop. It has few parts and all are easily detached and can be cleaned in the dishwasher top rack. You can also line the pulp catcher with a plastic grocery bag to catch all the pulp and then throw it away. The feed chute is fairly large and you can put a whole decent sized tomato or a small apple down it pretty easily. So it saves you chopping time. This juicer has 2 speeds – slow for softer fruits and veggies and high for harder veggies. The italian wire mesh spins at a very high rate and vegetable turn to juice and fine pulp in seconds. You are not supposed to run this juicer more than 3-4 minutes at a stretch but that’s ok as it is so fast that in 3 minutes you could probably get through several pounds of veggies. As a juicer it is fantastic, you can even put peeled oranges and tangerines down it and get frothy orange juice in seconds. I even made my own combinations. Ever tried cabbage, carrots and oranges together? It was pretty neat and tasted good!

However despite all the fun I had making several juice mocktails, I am taking away one star from this juicer as I am not very happy about the quantities of vegetables or fruits it takes to create one glass of juice. For instance, about 3-4 pounds of carrots will probably only produce a medium sized glass of juice. I remember metal hand cranked commercial juicers at juice stores from my childhood that produced more juice and less pulp. It also has a hard time with softer fruits even at the low speed. I put in 4 big bunches of champagne grapes into the juicer only to get a 6 oz. glass of juice. When I put the pulp back again into the juicer I got another 2-3 teaspoons of juice and there were still several grapes in the pulp that were not fully juiced. Therefore juicing with this machine can be expensive. I hate to throw away all the good pulp too…as it’s pretty wasteful. But I simply cannot make a carrot cake each time I juice carrots or a fruit pie each time I juice some fruits. So the machine is getting less use than it should.

Despite this being a nice juicer I may send it back and go back to eating fresh whole fruit and veggies. That way I’ll get the fiber and less calories. But for folks who prefer to drink juice to eating the raw veggies and fruit this is a powerful and well designed juicer and very easy to clean.

Update – The price of this juicer has been fluctuating a lot on Amazon in December 2007 it was listed for under 40 bucks for a few days and now in Jan 2008 it is closer to 90 bucks. Just something you might want to be aware of!

Review by J. Offenbach:

Received three of these. First one looked beautiful but leaked all over the place. Second one arrived with dried food crud and a sticky base. Third one was sticky and had a moldy blade/filter. Breville didn’t return phone calls or emails for one month. CSR representative was worthless. Amazon was great and accepted two returns for replacement. The juices these machines produce are very good and if you clean them immediately, that is easy to do. I can imagine that if you don’t immediately clean them, they end up like the second one I received, with crust embedded and a clogged filter. This is a product that I wouldn’t recommend buying in a “reconditioned” condition because Breville clearly lacks in the Quality Control area of their reconditioning center. Customer Service really doesn’t exist — I’ve never waited for a month after numerous attempted contacts with a company by phone and email, then to be told that they return every call. The rep actually told me that it was Amazon’s fault because Amazon sent out a dirty product, not them. Well, I received another dirty product and the second one was worse and both of the boxes definitely had not been opened by anyone other than myself. CSR then told me he had to go because he needed to make more calls and he wanted to go home. Really, he said that. Because this is a reconditioned item with a limited warranty, the Customer Service aspect of a purchase is critical. With a “new” product review, I wouldn’t spend the time on this issue, but had I known what a pain this would be to get some fresh extracted juices, I wouldn’t have done it in the first place. Wish I hadn’t given away my 30 year old Braun! Oh yes, I bought the 1 speed Breville for my daughter and she had to exchange the first one because it “sprayed juice all over the kitchen.” Don’t know a thing about the replacement yet other than it arrived packed in popcorn, not the styrofoam fitted packaging that the other did. I’m giving this juicer 2 stars because the juice is good and if you receive a nicely reconditioned product, it probably would be 5 stars.

Review by G. Lowitz:

We just received our Breville 800CPXL Citrus Press after the holidays and have used it several times since. Compared to the low-end (and much less expensive) plastic Krupps version we replaced (which kept tripping our GFCI), I rate this product 4.5 stars out of 5. It falls just short of perfection, but is nonetheless the most elegant and functional citrus juicer I’ve been able to find at this price point.

LIKES:

1) Beautiful die-cast design feels substantial and stays put when pressing citrus. Kudos to the industrial design team for turning a juicer into a work of art. This is by far the best looking electric citrus press on the market.

2) Brushed stainless exterior goes with any decor and looks great on countertop. No reason to store it away.

3) Removable strainer and juice basin are easy to handwash (I recommend using a small brush or toothbrush to help clean out the pulp).

4) Can press an 8-oz glass of orange juice in less than a minute and works with lemons, mandarins, oranges, and grapefruits without changing elements.

AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT:

This juicer works well and beats others I’ve tried. However, there are a few areas that Breville engineers could improve in their next model. None of these recommendations should cause you to avoid purchasing this unit, but I list them here nonetheless since there’s always room to improve most products:

1) Doesn’t handle large grapefruit as well as I’d like. Still left some juice/pulp in the skin, which I squeezed out by hand. Breville could consider offering a larger snap-on attachment more suitably sized for pressing grapefruit.

2) Sometimes the skin of the orange remains stuck inside the top of the press, requiring manual extraction. Maybe I’m pressing too hard, but this still seems to happen from time to time. On a few occasions, I stalled the motor completely which surprised me. However, stalling the motor didn’t cause the GFCI to keep tripping like the Krupps model we replaced.

3) The electrical cord is nicely designed, but a little too short. I’d prefer to see a 6′ cord to reach to the nearest outlet while allowing flexibility in where to place the juicer on the countertop.

4) If you leave the juicer out on the countertop where there’s a cabinet above, the handle (press) bangs against the top of the cabinet and requires a little finesse to pull it towards the edge of the countertop when you’re ready to use it. The typical height between the countertop and bottom of a cabinet is 18″ +/- 1″ and often the face frame of the cabinet protrudes about 1/2″ or so below the bottom of the cabinet underside. If Breville offered a locking position with the handle down, this wouldn’t be a problem and it would be easier to slide out the juicer into position from the back of the counter.

5) The handle itself seems a little flimsy when compared to the rest of the die-cast machine. While it’s functional and certainly strong enough, I would prefer a solid convex die-cast handle arm (oval cross section) versus the inverted “U” type cross section of the current design. Although the current arm does appear to be die cast, during the extraction process, juice and pulp tend to splatter on the concave underside of the handle. This makes cleaning the handle a little harder than it should if the handle cross section were convex on top and bottom.

Overall, this is an excellent product with bold design and good looks. I recommend this model to anyone who wants to add freshly squeezed citrus to your daily or weekly regimen. I can’t comment on the long-term reliability of the motor since we’ve only had the unit for a few weeks. But so far so good.

Review by StevieQ:

I have the red-colored model(800CPXLR) of the otherwise identical juicer that I bought from Golda’s Kitchen of Canada, while it was on clearance sale. It seems the red model is not available from U.S. dealers. It cost me a bit more to buy from a Canadian company because of the higher shipping cost and the currently unfavorable exchange rate, but to me the apple red color is much more visually appealing than the cold look of brushed stainless steel and was worth the extra cost.

This is the highest quality consumer-grade citrus juicer on the market by a wide margin. All the parts that come into direct contact with juice are made of stainless steel and it is easy to clean. Even the cone is made of very heavy cast stainless steel, a rare feature among orange juicers. The juicer is very heavy as far as home-duty orange juicers go, on account of the heavy 110W motor and heavy cast metal components. The heft definitely spells quality. The 110W motor has plenty of power. It comes with 2 strainers, coarse and fine, but this is clearly a low pulp machine. The coarse strainer will pass through a moderate amount of pulp; the fine will pass through almost none. Folks who desire high pulp from this juicer will likely have to scrape up some pulp from the strainer with a spoon and add it to their cups.

This is by far the easiest and fastest orange juicer I’ve ever used. Center a half orange on the cone and press the lever moderately hard and the pulp will be extracted cleanly from the orange. However, getting wet pulp off the orange is only half the battle. The other half of the battle is to extract juice from the wet pulp mesh using the strainer basket. For this machine, it does the first part with lightning efficiency, but on the second part it only does an average job. The overall result is that the total juice extraction rate is good, but not superb, because it does leave behind a considerable amount of very wet pulp in the strainer basket. The pulp has the consistency of wet apple sauce and I usually eat the tasty pulp after I finish drinking the juice. In comparison, very expensive commercial orange juicers (0 and up) typically have a sieve spinning at 1500 rpm or so to extract every possible drop of juice from the wet pulp to give 15% to 20% more juice than home juicers. The missing spin feature is the only major design feature lacking that I really wish it had, but then the spin extraction feature is rarely found on consumer-grade machines.

Another minor flaw is that the upper mold that fits on the cone is held loosely in the lever arm by a flimsy hard plastic snap ring. Daily removal of the upper piece will most likely wear off the snap ring’s friction in short order. For this reason, it may be wiser to just wipe the upper piece clean after each juicing session instead of popping it out for washing, but it is held so loosely that wiping it softly is enough to make it pop out from the arm.

In this price range, this is the best orange juicer I have seen yet.

Review by D. Bowman:

When I was in the market for a juicer, I had 2 in the price range I was thinking about. They were the Breville Compact Juice Fountain and Jack LaLanne’s Power Juicer. A friend had let me borrow the Power Juicer, and I really liked it. As I was reading reviews and doing research, I concluded that the Breville was a better choice. So, I went out and bought the Breville.

I made the wrong choice! When I juiced apples, it left chunks of apples un-juiced that were about the size of a quarter. It also sent a good bit of the peal into the pulp area. I also found the juice to be very “gritty” and full of pulp. I was juicing a days worth of juice for my wife and me (about 32 lbs of apples), so I had to stop the machine and clean out the pulp 3 times.

I have since returned the Breville juicer and bought the Jack LaLanne Power Juicer. It works much better. I can juice 32 lbs of apples and never change the pulp catcher (I put a bag in it, so I don’t even have to clean that part of the machine. The juice is much cleaner with less pulp. The Breville has a faster RPM motor, but the Power Juicer is every bit as powerful. It juices whole apples easily. You can also get about 4 decent sized carrots in there with no trouble.

All in all, I recommend the Power Juicer over the Breville. If you like a lot of pulp, then you might like the Breville. It is a good juicer for smaller quantities of juice. The Breville is a better looking juicer as far as its styling and color goes, but for me the Power Juicer wins hands down.

Review by Jessamine:

I have not used any other juicer so I don’t know how this compares to others, but I have read a lot of reviews where most complaints about juicers were about wet pulp and hard to clean up.

This thing is a complete BREEZE to clean up and actually goes in the dishwasher if you want to. I rent an older home and don’t have a dishwasher so I handwash and even that is quick. I can rinse off all pieces in less than 3 minutes if that.

The pulp to me feels really dry, sort of the texture of PlayDough. I don’t see how much more juice could come out of it.

Since this is so easy to put together, use, and clean up I am juicing every night. I am looking forward to starting a compost pile for my garden now that I am compiling a good bit of colorful pulp to add to the compost heap.

I never thought I would drink a beet but I’ve made some great juices with beets, apples, oranges, and a little piece of ginger. It makes me feel really good to know that I’m getting my daily alottment of veggies/fruits in a tasty drink instead of eating cups and cups of veggies that I’ve had to prepare, cook, clean pots/pans, etc.

Since it’s “compact” it doesn’t take up much counter space. About the size of a coffee maker. Noise isn’t too bad either.

My only complaint is sometimes smaller things slip over the chopping bowl (looks like metal coffee filter) such as grapes, small pieces of ginger, and some smaller pieces of fruit once it has been whittled down. It’s just a small bit of waste tho, about the size of a half dollar in the case of a beet, that slips over into the pulp bin without getting juiced. With the ginger, I just open it up (after the blade stops spinning of course) and retrieve the piece and try it again.

For , it’s hard to find a 700 hp model. Most are 400 hp in this price range.

So – I’m very happy with my purchase.