HELIMIX 2.0 Vortex Shaker Bottle, Blk

This bottle is amazing on paper but has one fatal downfall. The pros are: 1. Made in USA. A rarity these days. 2. The opening is wide enough to stick your entire hand in to clean without having to use a bottle brush. 3. There is no silicone gasket that you have to pull out to clean. No gasket also means no trapping of bacteria. 4. No crevices for mold or bacteria to hide. 5. No metal ball that scratches the inside of the bottle. Any metal will scratch off soft plastic over time. Is the amount of plastic ingested a negligible amount? Maybe. But it doesn't hurt to reduce it anyway. And now you don't have to wash an annoying ball whisk. 5. Mixes well. Although to be honest, I think "mixability" is more about the protein powder that you use than the bottle. I've mixed protein powder fully with no clumps in a Nalgene with no ball or vortex shape. The Fatal Flaw: **This bottle never saw the dishwasher. Only hand-washed. Leaked upon first use** This bottle clearly ticked off all the boxes on my list. However, after buying one, I immediately noticed that it leaks from where the lid screws onto the body. No matter how loose or how tight, it always leaks with less viscous liquids. If you are shaking a more viscous liquid like a protein shake, it'll hold. Anything less than that like water or pre-workout, you'll get splashed every time. It makes an absolute mess at the gym even if you're not shaking it. After contacting customer service, which was top notch, they generously offered to send a replacement. I was excited because there are no other bottles out there that are Made in USA and have the same gasketless, easy to clean opening (Blenderbottle is the same gasketless/wide opening design but not Made in USA). I really wanted this bottle to work. After getting the replacement, it started leaking again. So I contacted customer service one more time. They wanted to send another replacement. I agreed. The third replacement I can say has been leakproof for months now. Unfortunately, I dropped it onto concrete and now have to buy a new one. I am not looking forward to playing the lid lottery. While the bottle itself should be a 5/5, and the customer service is a 5/5, I cannot recommend this bottle unless you also want to play the lottery. It may take a couple tries until you get a leakproof one, or you may get lucky and your first will be leakproof. The Quality Control on this bottle is a 1/5 and they need to work on it. Visually, there are no differences between the ones that leak and the one that doesn't. None of them look warped or damaged to the naked eye. My theory is that the flange on the underside of the lid is imperceptibly out of round (maybe a half millimeter), which makes it not form a perfect seal around the bottle body. Perhaps it's a plastic molding issue and their machines have too much slop and the tolerances are not tight enough. Or maybe it's a design issue and they need to design the lid flange with more aggressive slants and a half millimeter wider. Either way, after two leaky bottles in a row, my trust has been broken. I will hold off on purchasing another until a Helimix 3.0 comes out or until they admit that this version has a high percentage of defect and officially state that they have made changes to fix it. If you look at reviews, you will find complaints of this issue all over the place. This makes me think that it's not just a one-off issue affecting 1 batch. If you can find this issue across different months/years, then it's not just one batch, it's systemic. I really hope Helimix tries something different to tighten up their quality control. This bottle (when working) is the best bottle on the market. The company has industry leading customer service, and should be commended for both being customer friendly and for keeping manufacturing in the USA. These two qualities are unicorns these days.