Kencko Review: Organic Smoothies & Bowls

Kencko’s menu features two main categories – Kencko organic smoothies and nutritional bowls, which are ideal for lunch or a light meal. Kencko also offers a few extras, like gum drops made with real fruits and veggies, plus additional protein packs you can toss into your smoothies. 

Here’s a closer look at the menu and what you can expect when you sign up for Kencko meal delivery.  

Smoothie Variety

Kencko smoothies are arguably their most popular item. With each order, you get a box with your chosen number of smoothies packaged into small packets of powdered fruit. These powdered smoothies are made with 100% organic fruits and vegetables. No preservatives are added, and nothing is removed from the fruits and veggies except water. The powdered form is pure, natural, and packed with nutrition. On average, each of the single-serving smoothies offers about two and a half servings of fruits and vegetables. 

Currently, the smoothie menu offers about twelve to thirteen options, including limited edition flavors. The spectrum of different flavors offers great variety, with options ranging from ultra-fruity to smoothies that taste more like vegetable juice. 

A few of the smoothie packets you can choose from include the Mocha smoothie, which is a great replacement for your morning coffee. The Mocha smoothie is made with cacao beans, coffee, berries, dates, Chaga mushroom, baobab powder, and a few more ingredients to add extra flavor. The Rubies smoothie is perfect for people that like a more traditional smoothie taste. The powdered smoothie packet includes sweet potato, goji berries, red pepper, apple, raspberries, citrus, and maca. 

Fans of green smoothies will like Ultra Greens. This one is packed with nutrition, including apple, yellow beetroot, pea protein, wheatgrass, kale, spinach, and green or blue spirulina. 

The full roundup of smoothies currently on the menu includes:

• Crimsons: Featuring flavors of acai, mango, & cinnamon
• Purples: A fun and tasty blend of mixed berries and other delicious ingredients
• Greens: Start with a nutritious base of spinach that’s sweetened with kiwi and banana
• Ultra Greens: Take the green power up a notch with apple, broccoli, alfalfa, spirulina, wheat grass, and more
• Mint Greens: Enjoy a touch of refreshing mint with your green smoothie, along with a nutritious blend of flavorful fruits and vegetables
• Peaches: Juicy peaches are the star of the show, complemented by rhubarb and coconut water
• Beet Reds: Beets, strawberries, and apples offer a great boost of antioxidants
• Corals: Beetroot blends with ginger, apple, orange, mango, and more
• Golds: Cacao, banana, flax seeds, pea protein, and dates make the perfect post-workout blend
• Mochas: Get your coffee fix in this smoothie that contains coffee, cacao beans, Chaga powder, and more
• Rubies: Luscious raspberries are complemented by goji berries, maca, sweet potato, oranges, and more beautiful red-hued fruits and veggies
• Blushes: Don’t shy away from this tasty smoothie with mango, papaya, and strawberry
• Spicy Tomato: Enjoy something a bit more savory with tomato, cayenne pepper, bell pepper, rhubarb, and more fruits and vegetables to give you an energy surge

While we have our favorites, after trying all the flavors, it’s safe to say that there really isn’t a bad one in the bunch. Some we liked more than others simply due to personal preference, but everyone’s taste is different, and there’s a great variety to choose from. 

Kencko also takes the time to list every ingredient in its smoothie packets and the physical benefits of each one. 

If you’re worried about the mess of preparing instant smoothies, don’t be. Kencko offers a shaker bottle, which you can purchase separately, but they usually discount it to zero when you order a box of their smoothie packets.

Bowls & Gum Drops

The second main area of Kencko’s menu is its bowls. Just like Kencko smoothies, the bowls come in packages that feature wholesome ingredients that have been flash frozen to preserve their flavor and nutritional integrity. They’re easy to prepare and great for on-the-go lunches or when you just want to toss something in your bag just in case lunch doesn’t work out or you may end up working late.

There are fewer bowls than smoothies on Kencko’s menu. On average, you’ll find about 6-7 options for bowls, but they’re all unique and flavorful combinations. The selection of bowls includes choices like beetroot soup, lentil chili, wild mushroom cousotto, and a tropical curry bowl.

While the bowls are great for lunch or a light meal, sometimes you want to treat yourself to something sweet. Kencko’s gumdrops are the perfect sweet treat. They taste just like candy, but they’re made with zero refined sugars, and they’re organic.

You have about six different fruity gumdrop flavors to choose from. One of our favorites is Passionita, with passion fruit, mango, and turmeric, but all the flavors are absolutely delicious and not overly sweet.

Overall, we were happy with the menu options that Kencko offers. Some might feel that the menu lacks variety and that the choices are minimal. However, we really appreciate that it’s organic, fresh produce that goes into the freeze-dried powders and that by limiting the selection, they’re able to keep costs affordable, adhere to their quality and sustainability standards, and make each smoothie, bowl, and gum drop taste great.

Kencko doesn’t use fillers or artificial ingredients in their fruit & veggie smoothies, bowls, or gumdrops. This means that the quality and flavor profile of each item is dependent on the quality of its ingredients.

Kencko uses only organic fruits, vegetables, and grains in all of its products. They are USDA and EU-certified organic. This covers all their ingredients, from passion fruit and sweet potato to chia seeds, flax seeds, golden plums, goji berry, and all the other wonderful plant-based ingredients used in each meal.

With such pure ingredients, there’s really nowhere for Kencko to hide its ingredient quality. Their commitment to ethical and conscious ingredient sourcing shines through, and it’s not just us that feel this way. Kencko reviews for ingredient quality and taste tell us that most people who try Kencko smoothies and bowls are equally impressed.

Fresh Vs. Freeze-Dried Fruits and Veggies

If you’re like most of us, you’ve been caught in the predicament of loading your refrigerator with a beautiful bounty of fresh produce, only to have it go bad before you get around to eating it all. Either you bought more than you could consume in the given window, or life got in the way, and taking time to prepare and enjoy fresh fruits and veggies got shoved to the sidelines.

Most of us are guilty of this, and it’s just one more thing that makes it difficult to fit enough fruits and veggies into your diet. Plus, if you’re living in a more compact space, all that fresh produce can take up a lot of room! These are just some of the challenges that the founder of Kencko had in mind when he set forth on a mission to help people get more fruits and vegetables in their lives. The solution he came up with was freeze-drying fresh fruit and vegetables to preserve their flavor and nutritional integrity.

The founder, Tomas Froes, had already embarked on a plant-rich diet, so he understood personally the challenges, which served as his inspiration for developing his freeze-dried instant smoothies. Still, the question that many are asking is if freeze-dried Kencko smoothies taste as good as others that are made with fresh rather than dried produce.

The answer is yes, they really do taste good, and if someone had handed us one of these smoothies already prepared, we wouldn’t have known that it was freeze-dried at all. The freeze-drying process offers the same nutritional benefits as fresh fruit, and some even say that they think Kencko smoothies have more flavor than the ones they make themselves in their own kitchen.

Aside from taste, there are other benefits to the freeze-drying process. For starters, the freeze-drying process allows Kencko to capture all of the nutritional value of fresh fruit and fresh vegetables. Produce only has a certain amount of time once it’s picked to ripen and reach peak nutritional value. It’s all downhill once it starts to degrade. By using the freeze-drying process, you get more flavor in your smoothies and optimal nutrition.

Because there’s so much flavor packed into each of Kencko’s smoothies and bowls, there’s no reason to have added sugars and artificial additives. The full flavor of the ripe produce is in each package, and freeze drying preserves the flavor and nutrition perfectly.

The final benefit of using freeze-dried versus fresh produce is that it significantly reduces food waste. According to Kencko, their process of freeze-drying ingredients for their smoothies helps their customers to waste as much as 30% less food. Plus, the way Kecko packages its smoothies and other meal options use significantly less packaging compared to traditional meal delivery packaging.

In our honest opinion, we were pleased with most of the Kencko meals we tried and would definitely order them again. However, if you take a few minutes to scroll the internet for Kencko reviews, you quickly find that this brand’s customers are clearly divided into two categories – love them or hate them.

Organic Smoothies

Some common complaints about the smoothies, in particular, mention that they’re bland, don’t taste good, or have a gritty texture. In our opinion, Kencko smoothies aren’t like your typical store-bought or meal-delivery smoothie. They aren’t packed with artificial ingredients or sweeteners, so you depend entirely on the flavors of the fruits and vegetables. This is a contrast to what many people’s taste buds are accustomed to.

We also suggest that you go in and look at the ingredients in each smoothie or bowl. The quick snapshots Kencko gives you on their menu page don’t tell the entire story.

Take the Blushes smoothie, for example. The snapshot says it contains mango, papaya, strawberry, and more. This sounds fruity and delicious, but if you look at the entire ingredients list, you’ll see that it also contains carrot, beet, cayenne pepper, and a few other ingredients. If you don’t know this upfront and look at just the ingredients in the snapshot, the taste will be something different than what you were expecting. In our opinion, this doesn’t make it bad, but it might taste different than you had imagined.

We also think that some of these smoothies taste best when you mix them with something other than plain water. For example, when mixed with oat milk, we really liked the mochas, but it would also taste great with something like unsweetened almond milk. The same is true for the golds, which are also great with oat milk or almond milk instead of water. For some of the other smoothies, we used coconut water, which also added a great flavor. We think even fruit-infused water would taste better than just plain water.

Our suggestion for getting the best flavor out of your smoothies is to take a look at the ingredients and think about what liquid mixer you could use instead of water to enhance the flavors. Also, keep in mind that chia seeds and flax seeds will add a little bit of texture, so if that bothers you, some Kenco smoothies might not be right for you.

Bowls

Kencko bowls don’t seem to be as popular as their smoothies. There’s the fact that people just seem to love smoothies, and they’re easy, but it might also have something to do with the fact that Kencko’s bowl menu is relatively limited compared to its smoothie selection.

Like their smoothies, we were overall pleased with the taste of their bowls, and we found both some favorites and a couple of others that we’ll pass on next time. Again, it’s really important to take a look at the full ingredient list to make sure there aren’t any ingredients or combinations in there that you’re opposed to.

We had the Curry Up Bowl, which is a tropical bowl, and we really liked the combination of different flavors. It was both filling and tasty. With red lentils, sweet potato, sweet corn, pineapple, mango, and a spice blend, the flavors seemed perfectly balanced, but some might find the sweetness of the fruit to be a bit much. If you’re not vegan or plant-based, a dollop of plain greek yogurt on top of this adds a nice creaminess and helps to marry the flavors.

In the end, we think Kencko meals tasted pretty good, but the flavors might not appeal to everyone’s taste buds.

A lot of people wonder if Kencko is a weight loss program. Technically, no, they’re not. While Kencko smoothies can be used as meal replacements, they’re not really the same as weight loss meal replacement drinks that you can buy that are attached to a weight loss program.

That said, it is entirely possible to lose weight while enjoying Kencko products, but the smoothies and bowls alone are not a weight loss program. Still, Kenko can be a great part of your weight loss program.

You can get a snapshot of the calories and nutritional value of each smoothie and bowl, which makes it easy to plan out your meals if you’re keeping track of calories. They also help you get more fruits and vegetables in your diet, which is great no matter if you’re trying to lose weight or not. The smoothies and bowls also contain ingredients like flax and chia seeds which offer additional fiber – something else that’s extremely important to any weight loss plan.

The thing about using Kencko for weight loss is that while the meals and smoothies are nutritionally dense, they’re very low in calories. If you want to lose weight, this seems great on the surface until you realize that an hour after your 200-calorie smoothie, you’re starving again, which increases the chances of binging on less healthy foods.

Aside from weight loss, Kencko smoothies and bowls offer other health benefits, including more fruit and veggies in your diet, and they offer a brain boost that improves focus and concentration. Some other flavors have natural caffeine, while others have additional benefits, such as immune support or nutrients that support eye and skin health.

Kencko smoothies and bowls are reasonably priced, especially when you stop to consider that you’re getting a real smoothie and not some bottle of processed foods. When you buy Kencko smoothies, you have an option to purchase 20, 30, or 60 smoothies at once. There is a price incentive for ordering larger quantities.

If you purchase twenty smoothies, you’ll pay $2.99 per smoothie (not including your costs for whatever you might use to mix with it). If you decide to take the leap and purchase the largest box of sixty smoothies, the Kencko cost drops to $2.49 per serving.

Although there’s a discount for ordering more, if this is your first time trying Kencko, we suggest going with the smallest box of twenty to try them out. The box of sixty is most convenient for people who enjoy more than one smoothie a day or plan on sharing their smoothies with someone. Kencko is a monthly subscription service, so you don’t want a backlog of smoothie packets backing up because you ordered sixty but were only able to get through half of them during the month.

Kencko also offers protein packs if you’re interested in adding extra protein to your smoothies. These can be purchased in packages of five or ten. The five-pack costs just under $10.

The bowls are sold in boxes of twelve, and you’re able to choose which flavors you want to enjoy. You can choose all of one flavor or mix and match to your heart’s content. The current pricing on Kencko bowls is $6.90 per serving. For a box of twelve, this will cost you just under $83.

Kencko also has a smoothie shaker bottle to make blending their smoothies easier and a bowl that’s designed to cook their bowl packages in. Separately, they’re priced at just under $10, but Kencko will usually discount them so that they’re free with your first order. Extras can be purchased separately.

Finally, there are the gumdrops. There isn’t a plan for the gumdrops like there is for the smoothies and bowls. Instead, you can add them to your order as an extra. Each package of gum drops costs $2.99.

The Kencko company is very committed to sustainability and using environmentally friendly packaging. All of their packaging are either recyclable or compostable. Because Kencko is able to package their freeze-dried ingredients into less packaging, they’ve been able to significantly reduce the packaging and environmental impact of their products compared to other companies that offer similar types of meal solutions but use traditional preparations and packaging materials.

Using the Kencko shaker bottle also helps to reduce packaging and waste. Kencko estimates that if their smoothies were packaged in traditional bottles instead of small packages that are designed to be mixed in the shaker bottle that they would have created a massive 40 tons of plastic waste. Kudos to Kencko for taking the initiative to be a role model in the meal delivery industry.

The final area of our Kencko review is customer service. This is one area where Kencko takes some hits with its customer reviews. Some customers appear to have had some difficulties with Kencko, including feeling like they weren’t properly informed that they were signing up for a subscription service with recurring deliveries and having difficulty managing their subscriptions. The biggest customer service complaint is that some customers still received shipments even after canceling their Kencko subscriptions.

When you sign up with Kencko, you’re emailed a link to create your subscription account after you pay for your first order. Once you have your account set up, you can access and manage orders from your account dashboard.

You can cancel Kencko yourself from your account online, but it’s important to know that even if you cancel, any remaining open orders will be shipped. Once an order is processed, it can’t be canceled, so you may still receive and be billed for a shipment if your subscription was canceled too close to the processing cutoff date.

If you’re unsure and know for sure, you don’t want another box. The best option is to contact Kencko directly and speak to someone who can help you cancel your subscription, cancel your upcoming order and prevent future unwanted shipments.

After our Kencko review, we find ourselves generally happy with the taste and quality of Kenko’s smoothies and bowls. We like that Kencko has made it so easy to increase our daily intake of fruits and vegetables, and we were quite excited about some of the fun, interesting flavors. While there were a few things we weren’t fond of, overall, we gave Kencko high marks.

Here are a few of our final thoughts.

What We Liked

• Great variety of smoothie flavors
• Easy to prepare
• Nutritionally density makes Kencko smoothies good for health-conscious people
• Ecologically responsible
• Organic, plant-based ingredients
• Great for people with dairy allergies
• Reasonably priced

What We Didn’t Like

• Some flavors were a little lackluster
• Some customers complain of a chalky texture
• Wish they offered smaller subscription packages
• Customer service reviews are not always great