Blenders get better when the engineers and industrial designers who make them listen to the smoothie makers and bartenders who use them—of that there’s little doubt. But often the real advancements come about through simple, silent observation. The best engineers and industrial designers are, much like doctors, trained observers with a knack for picking up on unexpressed needs. They also tend to be performance-driven perfectionists, and many enjoy a good blended beverage.
Unofficial field research
“When I have a frozen drink at a restaurant, I’m more critical than the average person if I find a big chunk of ice in it, ” says Brian Williams, Chief Engineer at Hamilton Beach® Commercial and inventor of the Wave~Action® blending technology. Unlike the average person, Williams knows exactly what has caused this unfortunate ice chunk: “Either it hasn’t blended long enough or the blades have formed an air pocket in the bottom of the blender jar and they’re blending nothing.” He adds, “this is where the Wave~Action offers such an advantage—the vertical wave action pushes the blended mix down in the jar and keeps it circulating.”
Call it an occupational hazard, but Williams is naturally picky about his blended drinks. Maybe that’s because he knows what a great blender can do, and he knows what goes into making a great blender. “It’s a long and highly structured process,” he says, “that begins with [the engineers] working with industrial designers to define the ergonomics and appearance of the product.”
Official field research: taking notes upfront
Bartenders are among the heaviest users of high performance blenders, so observing them in their natural habitat is essential for improving the equipment. It’s just this kind of field research that Hamilton Beach Commercial industrial designer Drew Carlson credits with changing the shape of blender jars: “we noticed that bartenders weren’t holding the blender jar like a pitcher, they were holding it like a mug, putting their hand between the jar and the handle to stabilize the jar as they poured.” So beginning with the Tempest, Hamilton Beach Commercial began making jars so that the bartender could easily hold the jar like a mug or, if they wished, still hold it like pitcher.
Another innovation that came from such “barfly” observation: bartenders don’t like to wait while a drink is blending—they prefer to multitask. Customized blending cycles and Auto Blend, which stops the blender when the drink reaches its perfect consistency, were invented to help bartenders multitask efficiently without sacrificing drink quality.
More official field research: observing on the back end
If a new blender concept makes it through rigorous internal and external reviews and comes to life in a functional form, it then undergoes a series of tests. At the engineering build phase, the blender is put through a battery of trials in the Hamilton Beach Commercial Test Lab. After that, a refined version of the blender goes to at least ten high-volume users—usually bars, restaurants, or coffee/smoothie shops.
As observers during this “real world” testing, a blender’s creators often cringe. “There are always things we haven’t anticipated,” Williams says. “We saw people using a spray hose to clean the blender base. You wouldn’t anticipate that someone would take an electrical appliance and hose it down, but that prompted us to improve the sealing where the motor shaft exits the housing. Now our best blender, the Summit [pictured above] is highly water-resistant. We can run it through multiple back-to-back cycles in [the moisture ingress testing apparatus] the Rain Machine and it simply doesn’t fail.”
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