TOTAL: 90/100

Since those solitary lockdown days in 2020, learning the trade secret behind your favorite fast food restaurant’s best-seller (i.e. McDonald’s ice cream) because you couldn’t frequent their drive-thru as much as you would like has become a new norm of sorts. These days, it seems everyone has become a master at perfecting their go-to orders at home—myself included. From whipped coffee to the perfect chocolate chip cookie, it’s hard to scroll TikTok or Instagram without coming across self-proclaimed dessert connoisseurs who have found makeshift ways to whip up their favorite sweets on their own dime.

Of course, most of us didn’t become pastry chefs and baristas overnight, so we had to rely on convenient gadgets and tricks to help get the job done. One of the most famous is the Ninja CREAMi, beloved by FoodTok for its ability to whip up frozen desserts in a snap. But I predict Ninja’s latest launch will be making headway on the app pretty soon.

The appliance brand recently added the Ninja Swirl by CREAMi ($350) to its repertoire, and it’s just as enticing as it sounds. With a quick whisk of ingredients and 24-hour freeze overnight, this machine churns out yummy soft serve with—quite literally—the touch of a button. I tested this product for close to a month to see if it rivals some of my favorite soft serves on the market. Will it dethrone McDonald’s reigning—and always broken—ice cream machine? Has Wendy’s frosty dairy dessert met its match? Are Mister Softee trucks going to be parked for the summer season? Here are my findings.

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While you can make thicker, denser, scoopable ice cream using this machine, for the purpose of this review, I stuck to only testing the soft serve ice cream program and the mix-in settings, since that’s the big draw to this new machine. I completed three rounds of testing, using the handy setup and recipe booklet as my guide. Keeping our PureWow100 scale in mind, I wanted to make sure this machine checked all the boxes of a home appliance worth taking up  your countertop space based on five key components:

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