Blendtec is a kitchen and grill brand founded in Orem, Utah, in 1989.
Blendtec's headquarters in Orem has a three-story blender built around its front entrance. It went up in 2014 to mark founder Tom Dickson's 40 years as an inventor. The jar has a conference room in it.
His company bio says he grew up putting big engines in little things. In 1968 he got an avocado blender as a wedding present, and it broke almost immediately. A few years later he accidentally ran wheat through his wife's vacuum cleaner and found it had started milling the grain. That led to the Kitchen Mill, an eight-pound machine the company says made flour twice as fast and twice as fine as a 60-pound stone mill. Blendtec followed in 1989, and Dickson has said it took 14 years to develop blades that won't break.
The blenders are designed and assembled in the 270,000 square foot Orem plant, and in 2021 the founding family sold a majority stake to Wasatch Group, a Salt Lake City firm. In 2006 the first five Will It Blend? videos went up on YouTube, made for $50, and drew six million views in six days. In 2010 Dickson blended an iPad, which had to be smashed first to fit.
After a court found that Vitamix had infringed the patents on Blendtec's five-sided WildSide jar, it awarded Blendtec about $24 million, the largest patent-related penalty in Utah history.
