Ninja Creami review: Does this viral TikTok ice cream maker live up to the hype?

Who doesn’t love ice cream?

When the opportunity came up for us to try this trending ice cream maker, we jumped at the chance to make our favorite ice cream. 

Made for those who want to create and customize their own ice cream at home, the Ninja Creami allows you to get super creative with your sweet treats, whether healthy or indulgent. 

Looking to justify pressing that ‘order’ button or just curious? Read on to see our thoughts about the appliance everyone’s talking about. 

(Spoiler alert: We love it!)

Read more: Up your coffee game with the best espresso machines

We tested it

Ninja Creami

You save $30 (15.08%)

$169$199

$169 at Walmart

$229.99 at Target

$249.99 at Ninja Kitchen

Pros & Cons

• Makes great quality frozen treats

• Easy to use

• Fast churning

• Long freezing time

• Loud when in use

• Makes limited batches

Features

Like other ice cream makers in the market, the Ninja Creami promises to make perfect quality ice cream every time. 

However, unlike other ice cream makers, this appliance does a lot more than just churn ice cream. With the Ninja Creami, you can make:

• Ice cream

• Lite ice cream

• Smoothie bowls

• Sorbet

• Gelato

• Milkshakes

There is also a ‘mix-in’ button, perfect for adding your favorite treats (like chocolate chips, dried fruit or even sauce) into your frozen creations. 

With your Ninja Creami machine, you’ll receive three tubs with lids, so you can create up to three pints of ice cream at once — but you can also buy extra pints from the Ninja store. 

How does the Ninja Creami work?

The Ninja Creami is extremely easy to use. You can fill the pint container up to the max fill line with your ingredients, ensuring the surface is flat, and freeze it for at least 24 hours. 

After 24 hours is up, you can simply scoop the pint into the outer bowl that’s provided, select the related spin button and the Ninja Creami will churn it up for you. With most of the desserts you create, you’ll need to select the re-spin button for a softer and creamier result since the ingredients will turn out icier or powdery on the first try.

Design

The first thing we noticed about the Ninja Creami was the sheer size of the appliance — it’s pretty big. If you’re looking for a compact ice cream maker, this may not be the product for you. It didn’t even fit on our kitchen worktop under the cupboards, making it slightly inconvenient to store. 

The device itself looks pretty sleek. It has curved sides in a cool slate grey and black colorway, making it look ultra-modern and chic. The smooth surface buttons look great and they have a secure ‘click’ sound when pressed, which we often miss with this kind of surface. 

The body of the Ninja Creami is mostly plastic and metal, which is common for kitchen appliances. The pints and bowls it comes with are all made from plastic as well, and they feel quite robust (which is essential when you’re blending frozen solid ingredients). 

We also appreciate that securing the bowl takes twisting, locking and releasing, which made us feel confident that the tub wasn’t going to go flying off our countertop. It also meant we could leave the appliance alone while it was doing its thing without worry. 

The pots and lids are all dishwasher safe as well — which is always a plus. 

Overall, we like the design of the Ninja Creami — it’s aesthetically pleasing and feels sturdy.  Our only complaint is it’s extremely bulky, which would be unsuitable for those with small kitchens or limited storage space.

Performance

The Ninja Creami promises to do a lot, but does it live up to the hype?

During the testing process, we made a variety of frozen treats. Check out our thoughts about the results.

Making ice cream

Recipe: Vanilla Ice Cream with Chocolate Chips, Ninja Kitchen

Making any ice cream flavor you want is undoubtedly the most alluring aspect of this machine — the world truly is your oyster!

Vanilla ice cream is a classic flavor that’s always a winner, but when it’s really good, we don’t think you can beat it. That’s why we were so excited to try making vanilla ice cream using Ninja’s own recipe. 

After adding all the ingredients to the tube and waiting 24 hours for it to freeze, we started the churning process. 

After churning it for the first time, we found that the ice cream was a bit powdery and not suitable for eating immediately. We added a little milk, hit the ‘re-spin’ button, and the ice cream was perfect after that. 

We could have stopped there, but since we wanted to add some chocolate chips, we poured some into the tub and pressed ‘mix-in’. It was ready to eat a minute later. 

 What did we think of the ice cream? The flavor depends on what you put into it, so while it tasted lovely, that’s dependent on the recipe. 

The texture was perfect — smooth, creamy and soft. What more could you really want? 

It’s a long process, but the satisfaction of eating great ice cream that you’ve made yourself makes it worth the wait.

Making a smoothie bowl

Recipe: Coconut Mango Smoothie Bowl, Ninja Kitchen

While we love ice cream, we were most excited about the Ninja Creami’s smoothie bowl function. We’ve tried using many regular blenders to make our favorite breakfast, but not one has come close to the results we’ve achieved with the Ninja Creami.

The process of making the different Ninja Creami options is very similar, and we did find that a re-spin was necessary for all of them (except for milkshakes). Instead of adding milk or cream like when making ice cream, we found adding yogurt got the best results when making a smoothie bowl. This also makes it great for frozen yogurt. 

The fruit was effortlessly blended, and we were left with a smooth, creamy smoothie bowl that we’d only seen in commercials previously. It’s undoubtedly going to be the reason to use the Ninja Creami every day. 

We found that each pint made about two servings of a thick smoothie, although we’d recommend re-spinning (and maybe adding more liquid) each time it’s re-spun. 

If you’re a fan of smoothie bowls, the Ninja Creami is an essential appliance for your kitchen. 

Making milkshakes

Recipe: Thick coffee milkshake, Ninja Kitchen

Unsurprisingly, the milkshake feature on the Ninja Creami was the most straightforward process since you don’t need to worry about the 24-hour freezing time. 

Simply add milk and ice cream to the pint, and you have a lovely, thick milkshake two minutes later. We like that you can choose how thick you want the milkshake to be by adjusting the amount of milk you add. 

While the milkshakes were lovely, we found the serving size a bit awkward — it made one really large milkshake or two much smaller-than-average-sized milkshakes. If you’re making milkshakes for many people, you’ll be waiting a lot, so it’s unlikely we’ll use this feature frequently. 

What to note with the Ninja Creami

While we enjoyed using the Ninja Creami, there were a few things we noticed. The machine is loud, which makes sense considering you’re churning a solid block of cream and milk. It’s definitely not a machine we’ll use to satisfy late-night ice cream cravings. 

Due to the fact that the blades don’t extend all the way to the sides of the tub, some of the solid mixture ends up not getting blended with the rest. While we were able to mix it manually, it meant there was the occasional icy crunch throughout the mixture. 

Some Amazon reviews stated that the blades in their machines did touch the sides of their pints, causing little bits of plastic to get mixed into their ice cream. Fortunately for us, we didn’t experience this issue when using the Ninja Creami.

Having to wait 24 hours to be able to make your ice cream/smoothie bowl can be slightly frustrating. If you like spur-of-the-moment treats, we definitely don’t think this machine is for you. While this can be remedied by always having a pint on the go, that won’t indulge any spontaneous cravings. 

The price of the appliance is also pretty steep at over $200. If you’re only a casual ice cream or smoothie bowl lover, we think it would be hard to justify the high price point. 

We tested it

Ninja Creami

You save $30 (15.08%)

$169$199

$169 at Walmart

$229.99 at Target

$249.99 at Ninja Kitchen

Pros & Cons

• Makes great quality frozen treats

• Easy to use

• Fast churning

• Long freezing time

• Loud when in use

• Makes limited batches

Our verdict: Is it worth getting the Ninja Creami?

We think it depends on how much you’ll use it. 

For us, it’s worth it for the quality of the smoothie bowls alone — and at this point, we've been using the Ninja Creami to make those almost every day. 

It consistently provides smooth, creamy frozen desserts that are hard to achieve with cheaper options, and it’s ridiculously easy to use — so if you’re looking purely at results, we think it’s worth buying this over regular store-bought ice cream. 

There are some misses with this, for example, the noise, bulkiness, and the price, but none of these are complete dealbreakers to us. That said, if you’re not in love with ice cream and gelato, or any of the features, we think the price is too steep to justify the purchase. 

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Prices updated on 10/17/2023. We are not responsible for any changes on the prices mentioned above.