Juicero Is Shutting Down
fortune.com
fortune.com
They should have went after the convenience store market using the soda dispenser/automated latte/vending machine/icee making business model. Basically convince the store owner to have some refrigerated space dedicated to the pouches and then put the machine nearby for the customer to make their own juice in real time.
I see a Juice company in the SF Ferry Building selling fresh squeezed juice for over $8. If they could have positioned themselves somewhere between that and $2 pasteurized/packaged juice from the grocery store, they could have done very well.
The concept of food that's uniquely tagged and tracked from origin to consumption is pretty attractive - makes contamination a breeze to trace back, keeps you from cooking with rotten food since the machine knows to reject it, and it could automatically track what you've got in your kitchen to suggest recipes / restock for you.
That's all been thought of before, the trouble is how on earth do you build that network? I suspect the reason Juicero got so much money is they were trying to build it first with high end luxury foods, and then expand down-market to eventually own the 'groceries of the future.'
Personally, I think good ol Jeff Bezos is going to win this one too by first owning grocery delivery straight up, and then going 'oh by the way they're all trackable if you want, you should buy Amazon brand appliances to make use of the feature :)" because as others pointed out here, counter space is at a premium and nobody really wants appliances that don't work with all their ingredients.
Anyway, that's what I tell myself to make this whole ludicrous story less sad.
Things going rotten are not that predictable, even if you know exactly when and where it was packaged.
There are cases where something can go bad before its expiry date, due to improper storage, but storage conditions until food reaches given appliance could be tracked too to account for that.
However - there is one food label that I have always wanted on meats: slaughter date, freeze/pack date, sell date, cook date, eat date.
So if I go to the store and there is meat in the freezer - when was that meat caught/slaughtered/packed/frozen.
Am I eating something a year old?
If you had that labeling - I would be willing to bet that healthier eating habits would ensue - not that the meat industry would prefer it though..
What I really would like is a "picked on" label on fruits & vegetables. A cucumber from my garden is fine 3 weeks after picking. One from the grocery store is barely edible a few days after purchase.
I just think that each step in the processing of food should be transparent.
Has frozen food sat in various places far longer than expected?
You know - the one where governments and police departments have equipment to fool the device to connecting to just them so they know exactly where I am?
That next logical step of Agafia sounds ludicrous!
What makes you think people want those things? I certainly don't, and I've never heard anyone mention wanting any of those things. I have heard people mention that they hate appliances like the coffee makers that only work with the expensive patented coffee pods from their manufacturer. (And printers, etc.)
I don't want any appliance that the manufacturer can shut down or refuse to run remotely. (See the recent story about the guy who paid off his car, but it was disabled remotely because he didn't pay the "remove the disabler" fee.)
In ~35 years of cooking, I don't recall ever using ingredients that went bad. I'm sure I probably did once or twice, but it didn't leave a bad enough impression on me to even remember, let alone want this sort of device that's tethered to the network and manufacturer, with all the problems that brings.
- Preheat the oven as I'm driving home
- Alert me when my laundry/dishes are done
- Alert me if my air filter needs replaced.
- Manage my AC/Heating for maximum energy efficiency.
- Real time energy usage monitoring.
- Turn on/off lights when I arrive/leave.
With Orange (French ISP) the IPv6 is dynamic. You have to pay a monthly fee to get a static.
More resources on the Tor Blog: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/quick-simple-guide-tor-and-...
I wouldn't want to have my oven on when I am not home- it might just be me but it seems dangerous to leave a hot oven unattended. I always check the oven before starting it to make sure it's empty. I guess I am somewhat paranoid that something somehow ended up in there.
The rest of the stuff I, personally, don't see any value in other than energy efficiency and that doesn't really require networking. My fridge is constantly telling me that I need a new water and air filters but I just ignore it and assume it's a ploy to sell more filters (like printers that report you need more ink despite printing fine).
Water filters can build up bacteria (listeria is not a fun thing - there are others, too - some pretty bad); this can cause everything from a "funky smell" to "go to emergency room or die". That said, tap water in most municipalities is pretty damn clean, and you can run without a filter; but if you don't want to change the filter, then do just that - remove the filter, so that you don't give the bacteria a nice growth area. If you do change the filter, don't go more than a year between changes at most. Most filters are cheap enough, usually less than $50 USD.
As far as the air filter - well, I've never heard of one on a fridge - but if you have one, it's probably to filter the air before it gets to the fan that cools the compressor. If you let it get super dirty, it won't move the air, and your compressor will be overheated/overworked, and it's life will be shortened, or it will fail - or the breaker on the fridge (know where your's is?) will trip. And don't take the filter off and just run filterless - because now the cooling coils will act as the filter, and they are anything but easy to clean (because if you don't, again failures will eventually occur - nbtw, that they sell a special fridge coil cleaning brush that looks like a very narrow bottle brush).
If you're talking about other filters in your house (HVAC) - then you want to change those too, fairly regularly. If you don't, again, you'll be overworking your A/C unit, plus the air won't be moved around effectively (making the unit run longer to cool/heat - increasing your bill). Plus, those filters get pretty nasty too - and that stuff doesn't stay on the filter.
They make reusable filters - you cut them with scissors to match the filter opening, then when you are ready to clean them, you take them outside and run a water from a sprayer hose "backwards" thru the filter, then let 'em air dry. That can be a cheaper and easier alternative to holding on to a box or two of filters (though such filters are pretty cheap).
Finally - note that on many cars (not all!) there is a "cabin air filter". Check your manual on how to replace it; most people don't know about that filter, but it isn't difficult to change out. Costs of course are variable, depending on the car. Again, though, if you don't replace it regularly, your cabin heating/cooling will suffer, air flow will be reduced, the fan motor will have to work harder, etc.
Basically - for air filter, check them now and then. When they look like they are getting overly fuzzy, or you can't see thru 'em - change them out.
I don't doubt that filters should be changed regularly but I don't trust LG to tell me when.
The water filter- My fridge makes ice and dispenses cold water from one of the doors. This mechanism has a water filter.
Well, then you are in the market for an IoT oven that is connected to your phone and car. A device that can continuously track your phone and car location, and turn off the networked oven if you are outside the house.
The problem is nobody wants to carry a dongle. Also, localizing the dongle inside the house is not as straightforward. Would the users need to put one dongle-detector in each room? one near each exit? If it has long transmission range, then it would probably be big/heavy due to larger batteries.
Oven preheating: takes 15 minutes when I get home barely enough time to prepare whatever I'm putting in there.
Loud dry/dishes alerts: I don't see how it's useful. If I'm not home it doesn't matter to me if the laundry or dishes are done or not as I can't do anything about it.
Any filter changes: almost all either work on specific timing intervals, so just set 5 years worth of reminders in your phone, or they detect pressure differentials and a service light can just turn on when the machine needs a new filter.
Manage AC for max efficiency: nothing a programmable thermostat can't handle unless you have really crazy schedules but even then the savings are minuscule.
Turning on/off lights: okey, could be useful.
For me, turning on lights etc are such a small part of my day, not to mention my 'needs' as to be completely insignificant.
If the machines would do something like sort, wash and fold the laundry that would be something, but as it is I people just buy them for novelty value.
And I am surprised how often I actually use little things like adjusting the lighting, finding my phone or keys, or even raising and lowering blinds.
Just yelling, "Alexa, turn off all the lights" as I walk out the door, or "Alexa, set the house temperature to 72" as I lay down for bed has really cut out a lot of fastidious things that by themselves doesn't matter much, but added up use a surprising amount of time.
Saying, "why would I want something to do x or y?" Sounds just like people I remember back in the 90s that said, why would I want email when I can just call? And then, why would I use text messaging when I can just email...
To each his own, I guess.
It's all managed by a raspberry Pi (About £20). The system can also pick up my wireless doorbell, and I am about to add temperature sensors and relays (£25) to my central heating system so everything is automated and controllable from Node-Red and a Web interface. Overall, I will have a private home control system for under £100 and I can view and manage it from my laptop or a VPN link from my phone.
At least with the Pi, Arduino, etc., you can control what your Things are doing, and have reasonable assurance they aren't doing things behind your back.
I have a Pi graphing outdoor and basement temperature and humidity using rtl433, MRTG, and some scripts, picking up the signals from existing temperature monitors. It's quite a surprise to see how much else is on 433 MHz in my neighborhood, even when using the stubby magnetic mount antenna that came with the RTL-SDR dongle.
None of us got sick, so far as I know. I took 4 bags (peas, corn, green beans, unopened peas) back for full refund.
Not sure what happened to the company (in eastern Washington) because this had to be horrendously expensive for them.
That said, Kuerig sells many of their machines, and many people like and use them. That fact is very strong evidence that there is a strong market for this type of product if it is done correctly.
In other words, people do want this kind of product.
On demand juice for < 50c/serving? Sure.
$2-$3/serving? Nope.
We use kcups at the coworking space here, and at 30-35c, they're worth the convenience. 60c? $1? Nope - we'll just brew a big pot.
But... we can get kcups from dozens of vendors with various flavors and price points. If a juicer machine had low price points (original machine and packs) that were available from multiple vendors... yeah, I'd go for it. But it's gotta have all these other factors (flexible vendors and low prices) which I'm not sure anyone wants to target.
That wasn't the question. It was about living without something you enjoy if it costs 0.60 or more.
That was the question.
If I don't have to pay the extra 60c... why would I do that? I have no incentive to pay $1 cup for something which I can get for, say, 40c/cup.
I might pay $1/cup, sometimes, but if I can get it for 40c... why pay more?
I've been working from home all week, and we had electricity and internet right through the storm.
That's with 3 feet of water in the street outside.
But that's pretty cool they handled it.
That said, people need to be a lot more literate in this sense.
The other benefits you mention are marginal at best, in my opinion. I would never pay a premium for tagged and tracked food like that.
Edit: Funny, there's a post on overengineering on the front page!
If you put that much effort into it, then you can just as well remember what you need to buy when.
But obviously that wasn't the main point. Using computer vision you can automate it.
It would be hard to make something more convenient than a pen and paper though. And in the store crossing things off the nigh indestructible scrap of worthless paper is better than fiddling with a device.
[0]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mightyfrog...
A piece of paper is 'always on', it wraps around the push bar of the food cart so I don't have to make adjustments to hold the 'device' and steer at the same time, or keep fishing the phone out of my pocket and unlocking it, nor from the cart itself, while ensuring I don't drop any shopping on the screen or stray too far from the cart and give someone the opportunity to grab the phone.
The only way I'd go back to using a smartphone is if the cart had a lockable universal smartphone cradle. Bonus points would be given for a built-in charger - provided the stores maintained everything so you didn't need to 'test' the carts outside to find one with a working charger and cradle.
And even if we're talking cuts of meat, i think technology like MATS(microwave assisted thermal sterilization) may give you high quality meat that doesn't spoil for very long, so that won't be an issue.
And as for suggesting recipes based on fridge content or restocking (are those such big problems for consumers?) - there are probably other ways to solve that , like AI + camera, no need to reshuffle the whole supply chain.
If this were ever to happen - and what I know of food chemistry makes me strongly skeptical - you would definitely see it in actual restaurants way before you get it at home. Because for a restaurant, if you can effectively replace a human costing >$40k/yr with a change in supply chain and a fancy machine, you can easily afford to pay $40k for the machine alone. A consumer would never afford that.
(Same goes for fully autonomous cars.)
As for the "reducing food waste" concept - no store actually wants to achieve this. Think about it - actively trying to get people to buy less of what you sell is pretty bad for business.
Which is why it's ripe for disruption. The consumer could be better off, a company that isn't in the space already could be better off, they're the people who need to make it happen.
My neighbor grows soybeans, and he hates the guy who buys his soybeans. If someone came in and treated him better and paid him more, I think he'd leap at the chance to sell his crop to them even if it imperiled the future.
Besides, suppliers aren't monolithic. Many suppliers are scrapping for new business or ways to differentiate themselves. Better farmers could be more successful in a paradigm where they could earn extra money for healthy plants than say selling to walmart who simply pays a fixed price if the plants meet minimum standards.
Ever heard of a TurboChef oven? Because that's almost exactly what you're describing. Think of it as a combination oven that uses microwaves, thermal, and convection to cook stuff extremely fast, and generally of a pretty decent quality.
If you've eaten at just about any restaurant, you have likely had something prepared in one (if not the whole meal).
They are actually pretty nice machines; if I had the counter room at home I'd have one. But they aren't cheap...
Going from that to sticking it in a scanner to get permission to eat it probably doesn't add a lot of utility.
If only we had some kind of olfactory or optical equipment stuck on the front of our faces that could help determine the rottenness or mouldiness of food.
Failing that, perhaps producers of packaged food could use some kind of common standard system to inform consumers of the date by which the food should be used by, or before which it might be at its best.
Your eyes/nose won't pick up bacteria in the flour.
I barely read half my mail, snail or electronic. The chances I'm going to see and read and act on a "your food is bad!!!" email (assuming it doesn't get eaten by some filter) before I eat the food in question is low, low low. Some device getting the message and physically stopping me is really the only way to be sure.
Kidding aside, this is too simple of a problem to solve. Serious contamination isn't a part of 1st world daily life, because we have excellent news and regulations (so far). Rotten food is easy to detect, and even some of the stuff we consider rotten would probably not make us sick.
It's all a shiny coat of wax on a non-problem, just like bottled water and gingivitis.
"If we recognize the bag, and it's recalled, we'll stop you—or at least yell at you. If you use someone else's bag you're on your own, but we won't stop you."
Surely they were capable of having this thought. That they didn't or chose to ignore it hints at ulterior motives—most obvious is overcharging for the bags, since not buying them makes you the proud owner of a $400 paperweight.
But a prediction: almost everyone who attempts to block consumers from consuming bad food with technology will do it to overcharge for the food. Safety will be the excuse, not the purpose.
If your goal is reducing food poisoning through TECHNOLOGY! and CONNECTIVITY! to better inform consumers if their food has been recalled, you'd be better off developing food packaging that could eg change color when the food is recalled - a big giant red skull and crossbones appearing on my food packages would probably keep me from accidentally eating bad food. That would both be a challenging engineering project (since it'd have to be cheap, food-safe, and ideally biodegradable), and work for a far wider range of foods and ingredients.
You'd remember if it was anthrax.
Wrote this because I got in a similar conversation on twitter: https://medium.com/@nickparkerprint/in-defense-of-juicero-an...
However, that tracking belongs at the kitchen door using a common industry standard format, and the ability to manually enter inventory items.
If you need a different appliance to prepare food from each vendor, then you won't be able to make Alphabet spaghetti with Amazon beef and Apple tomatoes; you can't pop to the local shop to get some milk; you can't go into your garden to pick some carrots; you can't go to a specialist vendor to get a particular spice mix or exotic vegetable; you can't buy your favourite varieties from a local grower.
I can't picture giving up on those advantages just so that Mr. Bezos can tell me what to eat.
The only thing I can add is perhaps a corollary to this, which is "nothing causes a business to fail more than solving a non-existent problem" which is what Juicero did.
Now I think you could make that stuff better, don't get me wrong, I'm not going to hate on Juicero for that. Their entire play was just VC-Bingo though: they had a device, they had a subscription, they had "lock in" (device is only good with the subscription) they had internet attachment, it's a health and wellness type play, probably some other things I'm not thinking of. Anyone know if they had to subsidize the prices, that'd be the grand slam if they had to do that too. $30 a week for 5 packs of juice, that's $120 a month and you do the work and clean up the mess and you have to get different juice on the weekends. The bags aren't supposed to make that much mess but I think the psychology of it all is huge, a coffee maker doesn't make much mess either and you'll pay a gigantic premium at a coffee shop. How many months before you get a tip-top of the line cold press juicer that'll make juice out of any produce? With no subscription.
And it's far from certain that first business would attract VC's.
Good idea but I don't think it's that easy: the extraction of olive oil is not a simple matter of pressing olives until the oil comes out, but a long process with multiple steps [1] that I doubt they could been done by a press that is relatively simple as/as big as Juicero (as it can be seen by the cons in the two methods for the extraction that are listed on wiki).
I've noticed that the digital multi-flavor soda dispensers create more customer bottlenecks compared the regular 4-6 nozzle dispensers. Having every customer figure out how to load a "juice pack" then operate the machine seems like it would have a similar inconveniencing effect.
You can market it as "fresh".
That's mostly carrot (+lemon and orange) but still it's very dry. See also AvE's video[1] where he opens a bag and its full of processed but still largely intact pomegranate. You can squeeze most of a first glass out by hand[2] but that's about it. To get the rest out a press really is necessary- but Juicero isn't just a press. It's massive machined aluminum billets and expensive gears and a custom motor. The huge aluminum parts are likely the biggest cost sink- hundreds of dollars, easily. If they had made the things out of extrusions they could have saved 80%+ on the cost. Just goofy all around.
edit: also this... enthusiastic gentleman, who is pretty enthusiastic about the contents of the bag[3]
[1]: https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ?t=30m6s
I don't know about you, but that cleanly fits my definition of "shredded".
> edit: also this... enthusiastic gentleman, who is pretty enthusiastic about the contents of the bag[3]
Yeah, discountjuicers.com guy is a real hoot. Good info too.
LMAO
Point being is it's not just a juice bag- they do at least have good intentions/make a show of having good intentions.
I don't drink OJ much anymore, but a couple of years ago I had some Pure Premium and noticed that it really tasted a lot more like concentrate than I'd remembered--it had that kind of acidic/slightly artificial taste.
So, I did a little digging and found that it is now run through a process called "deaeration". Apparently, this is well-known and the subject of controversy. The short is that they take the oxygen out, pasteurize it, and store it in massive tanks. Problem with that is that it loses its flavor. So, they add "flavor packets" before packaging it.
It's amazing that they can still call it 100% juice. Then again, it's somehow legal to say that a carton "contains 100% juice" simply because at some point some measure of 100% juice was poured in, even if the total juice ratio ends up being 2% when other ingredients are subsequently added.
OJ is a scam from start to finish: from the ridiculous claims about its healthfulness; to the slightly-shrinking packages, designed to look the same standard sizes; to what they dub 100% pure squeezed juice.
This story is similar to Theranos
It's one thing to provide a massively overpriced juice press combined with a ridiculous subscription model than actually endangering peoples health by willful lying.
I cannot see any other reason for Theranos' conduct and if this world would be only halfway fair their executives would look at it from behind bars.
They also could have just built a "scrappier" v1.0 hardware product at a lower cost (maybe with rollers or something) at 50% BOM cost and subsidized it a bit more. At $200 + $6-8 per pack they might have been successful; at $200 + $200/mo for 30 packs they probably would have been.
Here is a 'juicero' that you can fill with whatever chopped fruit you want and get the same/better results:
https://www.amazon.com/Fruit-Press-Italian-Stainless-Brewcra...
I find this line really funny for some reason. (Juicero has been the laughingstock of the tech community over their go to market, pricing, and marketing/business models, and we are now looking at the pieces as they exploded over this fact.)
So I had to try really, really hard not to reply to your innocent comment with mock surprise - like no! You think?
>I think they went about getting to market wrong
I admit to a slightly childish glee in ordering an orange juce and watching the machine peel and juice the fresh oranges. (Mostly I eat actual fruit).
Cost-wise it is more expensive than buying not-from-concentrate juice in a half gallon quantities, but not that much more so. Definitely <= 100% premium and you get it freshly squeezed right before you.
https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensi...
But, take a look at the quality of the internals of Juicero vs. Beats headphones and realize that one of the companies is worth $1.5B while the other is shutting down.
Even so, I don't think a large difference between the BOM and the price the consumer pays is necessarily a ripoff. There's more to a product than simply how much it costs to manufacture.
Actually, in some jurisdictions, if that difference goes over 12.5% of the paid price, and the customer is not specifically informed about this (and about potential cheaper competitors), the contract is not valid.
Like how do you convince yourself that this is a sane design for something more than a prototype? Using more off the shelf stuff might result a little more weight and a higher overall part count but the cost savings would be huge.
> This is what you get with no constraints. Building something that lasts and doesn't break the bank is what's hard. This thing will last forever, but it's a machine to squeeze pre-masticated fruit in a plastic bag that costs $400.
I've watched this before and just skipped through to find that bit, but I'm fairly certain he also mentions at one point how they're almost certainly selling the juicer itself at a loss, which makes the whole thing that much more absurd.
Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ&t=15m07s
and here:
(I'm assuming there's tons of people who are going to miss that deadline anyway)
Anyone have the specs on the motor specifically (and please ignore my naivete): max RPM vs power consumption -- what about the power of these motors would be preferable to those on a boosted board (or reverse)?
A smart person would put a bounty on all the tings they made
He had a better idea though: pass the bag between one or two rollers.
- If the machine takes away all my liberty (I cannot use it on my fruit and vegetables) and even their packs need to be refrigerated and stay good only for 8 days, can't I just buy the resulting juice and put it in my fridge? (If I left the bottle closed, that would last equally long). So what do I gain?
- They're using QR codes to check that I'm not using their packs beyond the "best by" date or try to trick the machine into squeezing a competitor's cheaper packs. And for that, they need a camera on the inside. And WiFi. Didn't somebody at some point notice that the way they're treating their customers is really disrespectful? This is the whole printer-cartridge-thing all over again.
EDIT: layout/typos
Humans are weird, and this is a very good marketing strategy.
Nespresso became extremely popular because:
1) The machines are very cheap (compared to other espresso makers)
2) They take a fraction of the time to prepare coffee (compared to other methods)
3) They are extremely easy to clean
4) Capsules have a long shelf life, you can get them in small quantities, so it doesn't matter if you drink 3 cups of coffee per day or 3 cups of coffee per month.
5) They have really fancy stores in top locations where they sell their capsules
Everything about Nespresso is convenient and feels great. There is no DRM, because that would not be convenient.
The only thing that's convenient about the Juicero machine is that it is easy to clean. Everything else about it, from the short shelf live to the subscription pricing, to the long time it takes to make juice, is just inconvenient. The DRM and Wifi requirement is just stupid.
Additionally, the taste benefit of nespresso over instant coffee or something similar is probably much higher than juicero over the best bottled juice.
The value is quite clear in the context of alternatives. Which is where I believe Juicero stumbles when one considers the various alternatives. Especially with the high cost and fast expiration dates.
In Germany, Nestle tried and failed to ban sales of unlicensed pods:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandcon...
Simply not true, I have an 160eur Delonghi espresso machine which takes grounded coffee (doesn't grind it itself), and it's pretty awesome for what it cost me. Every 2 weeks, I go to a local coffee shop where I buy on high-quality freshly roasted coffee which I let the shop grind for me. It gives me way better coffee than what I get from a Nespresso.
Sure it's a bit more cleanup, but the results are a lot better, and it allows me to pretty easily make a killer cappuccino.
> 4) Capsules have a long shelf life, you can get them in small quantities...
Coffee, once roasted and grounded does not have a long shelf-life, taste and quality goes down remarkably. That's probably also what makes the most difference in quality comparing a Nespresso with my 'fresher' coffee. The capsules being packed in vacuum does improve this, but I wouldn't keep them for longer than a year.
I get my coffee in 250g bags, which is about 15 espresso's, that's not exactly 'large quantities'.
> 5) They have really fancy stores in top locations where they sell their capsules
I prefer local specialized shops that know what the hell they are talking about.
But yes I get the convenience and cleaning. Time to prep is a thing, with my machine, it takes about 1.5 to 2 minutes from start to finish, including 30 sec brew-time and quickly rinsing and wiping everything - which isn't that bad in my book - but yes, a Nespresso scores points here. I don't think I would go through the hassle at work every time I wanted a cup.
With the Nespresso, I just put the capsule and I get my coffee. The cleaning is easy and I don't need to clean stuff for every coffee.
Sure, you might do a whole bottle of coffee and consume it during the day. But the machine gives you convenience and it is affordable.
I have no problem putting 200-300USD on a coffee machine.
For juice? Well, I like it fresh. I didn't try Juicero but I highly doubt that it compares to freshly squeezed oranges.
Also, I think at $50 a lot more people would consider it. Keurig coffee makers seem to have done pretty well and I'm sure the $100 cost was a big part of that (as opposed to charging say > $200).
[1]: https://www.acemart.com/equipment/beverage/juicers/zumex-ess...
Negative press, overengineering, the smaller market group, and underdelivering convenience (the bags are just way too big compared to coffee) killed juicero. It was such a high-profile and brutal lambasting that it will be a scarlet letter for quite a while, but the core idea is solid enough that I wouldn't be surprised to see the idea re-emerge in 2-3 years.
I still can't get over how much people viscerally hate the idea. You'd think apple, google and microsoft had partnered to make a juice press because of how much juicero represented silicon valley-ness.
Are you serious? I think Keurig succeeded because it was able to offset the lock-in with genuine convenience and better coffee than most people were drinking.
If the idea will re-emerge, I'm sure it will be more focused on customer convenience rather than lock-in. Literally every single "feature" of juicero was there to enforce the lock-in. The camera, qr codes, always-on wifi, proprietary bags. It's a miracle the company lasted this long.
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/BYaIlV4jFb5/?taken-by=dougevans
With vision like that, it's hard to believe there were any issues.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1793272089/juisir-juici...
...and Juicero even tried to sue them a few months ago:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/juice-wars-juice...
It’s strange they didn’t fail from the very beginning.
Tried it in a bar in San Francisco: slow as fuck, avg juice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
Edit: Most like contains strong language...
That was always a bullshit reverse-engineered marketing spin on their device.
That the founders and the dialogue around it were all aspirational BS just exasperated the problem. It felt like it was constantly pitching a lifestyle very few people have, want or care about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ (possibly NSFW for language - use headphones)
The biggest problem is Juicero isn't a juicer. Juicero's market was limited because the average customer doesn't want to pay a premium for juice press theater. Shoving juice into packs that are hard for the consumer to access is simply a worse experience than the status quo containers of juice.
Yes, this should be their epitaph.
It's actually hopeful in a way. Substance still has sway over style.
I'm not sure how you can even make an argument that it was a scam. A stupid business model isn't the same thing as a scam - it was a real product, however ill conceived.
Even "traditional" pressed juice companies are starting to see a crunch, as their evangelical customers ("health nuts") are realizing that eating an apple is healthier than pressing 4 of them.
Pressed fruits at least, are sugary drinks. Anyone who's calorie conscious is probably wary (as a calorie counter I know I am).
Pressing (but not blending) leaves some of the good bits (including bits that mitigate some of the adverse effects of sugars) behind, but it does not destroy the nutritional value, as many of the important micronutrients of the fruit are retained in the juice.
Hyperbole isn't helpful here.
Either way - an all fruit diet is not healthy or balanced. And as far as I can tell, whole fruits are still better for your health then pressed/blended/squeezed.
Relevant : https://www.wired.com/2015/04/nobody-can-prove-cold-pressed-...
That is utter nonsense.
Yes, whole fruit is healthier than blended fruit or juice. No, that does not mean there is no nutritional value.
It’s certainly not as clear-cut as I thought, and I reckon smoothies are probably still pretty good if you aren’t overdoing it!
First, human beings need sugar to survive, yep it's like water, without sugar you die, in particular your muscle and your brain.
There are good and bad sugar, artificial sugar in food and drink sure are terrible for the health, but you also have natural sugar like fructose in fruits, lactose in milk, etc. those are good.
You definitively can not say that apple juice is poisonous like sugary soda.
Those are not the same type of sugar.
Well, they didn't make any comparison to Pepsi in their comment, but I 'll go ahead and make that comparison.
12 fl oz of:
* Orange juice: 31.2g of sugar
* Apple juice: 36g of sugar
* Coca-Cola: 39g of sugar
* Pepsi: 41g of sugar
Not the same, but in the ballpark. But iirc, regular Coke and Pepsi aren't growing. Diet Pepsi/Coke are. The brands are also coming up with semi-diet versions, such as "Coca-Cola Life" (17g of sugar).
If you could have just shoved fresh fruit into it, they would have been ok.
But whoever talked investors out of $118M probably also sold everyone on the H-A-A-S model, which didn't quite fit for this product.
If you want really fresh and nutritious drinks, get a high-power blender. Not only do they operate on any fresh fruit and vegetable, they keep all the fiber in the produced drink. So less sugar percentage (especially if you have lots of vegetables in the mix) and vs. eating the fruit directly, the high power mixing helps digesting all nutritients much better than just chewing can.
As a bonus, you can use it for many other cooking tasks (soups, sauces) but also you can do things like blending a good amount of ice with the fruit to get a cold and icy drink and my favorite is just to mis a scoop of natural yoghurt with frozen berries (add sugar, cream, a shot of bourbon to your taste) to instantly get a nice ice-cream like dessert.
(Disclaimer: there are a very few vegetables which should be eaten cooked only, so don't use those for a smoothie, others only in reasonable dosis, so some very basic reading is recommended)
Can someone watch the video in the article and explain what sort of mindset you have to be in and think that this is a good idea? Perhaps the initial vision was different somehow and the final product does not align with what you thought you were putting your money behind? Is it possible that you see the issues, but have so little faith in consumers not to buy crap that it seems like you'll make a reasonable profit? Maybe there's something you see or know that I don't -- perhaps some sort of shake up in the fruit industry was set to make this a hit only to not meet expectations?
I am now more deeply concerned than ever about the effect that an exploding tech bubble is going to have on our economy.
I am NOT saying anything bad about the DSC, I love the commercials, but you have to wonder about a company who's business model is intertwined with subscribing to a product.
I order diapers for my kid on a subscription. As a consumer it works great for me since I didn't have any upfront one time cost like $700.
The problem I see with Juicero and its investors is that the machine is not unique, it is redundant, the investors were clearly blinded by the founder's pedigree to overlook the simple clear fact that the machine was not needed and the founder was delusional to think the machine was needed.
Laypeople always seem shocked when a VC-funded company implodes. We should actually be surprised if we didn't see routine flame-outs, as that would mean VCs aren't taking on appropriate quantities of risk for the asset class.
As a final aside: I've lost count of the number of times I've pulled an about-face on businesses I initially thought were stupid -- once I had a chance to talk to the founders and better understand the vision. Many of these seemingly 'dumb' ideas have surprising depth.
Some, granted, are in fact dumber than a box of rocks.
Often times, if you can make a consumer happy with the experience, they don't care if they're overpaying for a terrible product.
The problem with Juicero is that their user experience laid bare how futile and ridiculous their product was by having consumers manufacture the product themselves.
If the Juicero simply made those juices in a bottle (EVEN IF the nutritional value was lost during bottling) I can see them succeeding based purely on their marketing and people suspending disbelief to support their idea they were being healthy while looking cool.
Blue Apron and every other meal kit delivery business sits on the other end of the same road, yet they seem to be doing okay and without the same level of ridicule.
I wonder whether Juicero could have avoided this outcome had they mailed their customers whole fruits and asked them to peel and fill their own juice bags, that way people will not be able to put two and two together to realise that it is just another beverage maker with DRM.
P.S. I remember Juicero being rather well received by the resturant industry as it is fully automated and requires minimal cleanup, so perhaps they marketed to the wrong crowd after all.
Juicero was too visible in high-standard markets and thus became an easy target. Whereas Blue Apron flew under the critic radar (mostly in Facebook mom feeds) before gaining enough market share for consumers to shrug off ridicule
https://www.google.com/search?num=20&q=fresh+food+delivery+s...
The last 3 words make this all the more stupid.
What juicero did was sell you an expensive machine to essentially squeeze odwalla bottles for you into a cup... something ludicrous like that.
There may be a market for juice bottles, but juicero wasn't selling juice bottles.
VCs are not idiots, they are probably much more humble than what ordinary people think they are, because any active VC--especially if they're successful--would have run into at least several cases where they passed on a company because they "looked stupid", just to find out that they went on to become wildly successful.
Once you go through this routine several times, you generally learn to appreciate and not immediately discount seemingly stupid ideas. This happens not just to VCs but overall if you live in Silicon Valley.
Since ideas alone aren't enough, the only good measure in my experience is looking at the person who's working on it. And here lies a lot of mistakes VCs make, they just look at some guy who was successful in the past and just think it's safe to bet on them.
To be clear, I also think Juicero was a stupid idea, and I think it was stupid of them to waste so much money upfront instead of starting scrappy, but my point is that there is no such thing as an "absolutely stupid idea". Ideas are contextual.
Few would be surprised by a few million being spent looking for a market fit on a wacky idea, it's the scale and obvious demand to get involved at such a late stage.
So I don't think it's completely crazy. But a back-of-the-envelope calculation should have shown that it's probably not a great idea.
Many people make coffee each day and they might even drink juice, but most people drink juice from bottles, so Juicero was solving a problem that didn’t really need solving for the average consumer.
Contrary to popular belief none of that stuff is healthy. It doesn't matter whether it comes from a juicero or from a bottle, it just all contains far too much sugar.
IMHO, of you take an apple and extract the fiber and water, you shouldn't be calling that fruit any more.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081210090819.h...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/05/is-sugar-wor...
- Expressos are minimally hard to make correctly, and those capsules are above even the quality of some coffee shops.
- There is a big movement of gourmet coffee that favors high priced drinks with the correct marketing (not perfectly correlated with quality).
None of those seem to apply to Juicero. They may have aimed at the last point, but I don't think it's something you can create on a startup's budget.
Capsule is far more expensive over the it's lifetime than something like a Gaggia Classic. Capsules aren't anywhere near the quality of coffee shops, unless you're counting Dunkin.
Nitpick on your nitpick. While the word originated in Italy as espresso and that is mostly what we use in the English-speaking world, expresso is not totally uncommon and it's not necessarily a misspelling or folk-etymological error. French and Portuguese use the expresso variation for instance, and the x spelling is considered 're-latinized'.
Depending on where you live the beverage may have entered your culture via French or Italian influences, perhaps one reason why expresso seems more common in Canada than in the US (though espresso dominates in Canada as well, no doubt helped by the ubiquity of Starbucks).
To add on to this - many offices replace their teas with Keurig capsules as well. This leads to a tea that's much more expensive (capsules are something like 4 or 5 times the cost of a tea bag), dirtier, more complicated and more time consuming to make.
Looking at the popularity of Keurig machines, I'm not surprised people saw potential in Juicero.
Portuguese is my first language, and I never even noticed it's written differently in English. Noticed now.
As I said in my gourmet item, it is not something that correlates perfectly with quality. It may correlate better with price than quality. It's a property coffee shares with wine.
The cheaper capsule machines are about the same price as the cheaper non-capsule espresso machines.
It's true that the high end of espresso machines goes well above the high end of capsule machines, but that doesn't seem particularly relevant.
If you look on gumtree (like craigslist here in Australia) by far the most common appliance item by a very large margin are basic juicers. People like the idea, but in practice they go un-used because they're a pain to clean and people can't be bothered.
Best I could tell that was the same idea Juicero was after.
I get my beans whole, by subscription, grind them myself just before making an espresso. Another advantage of starting from the beans (apart from something that is actually pleasant to drink) is that you can select lots of other brewing methods, whether it's aeropress or moka pot, cafetiere or filter, with different grind levels as appropriate.
Also if you like milk-based coffee products (where the taste of the coffee is far more diluted, and the quality is less relevant), having a steam wand is handy and much better than any attachment I've used on any coffee machine, including Nespresso, and other much more expensive models that do bean to cup.
Was the price too high? Didn’t manage to turn PR against them? Was it designed to fail?
I think the product is awesome in every possible way.
The model worked for Nespresso (Kruger or smth in US), printers, dishwashers, Soylent, etc.
If one negative article about your product can kill your company, your problem is not a couple of journalists. It's your product.
I'm pretty sure this is a deliberate reference to the specific thing. I'm not sure if I won't end up looking stupid for saying the obvious, but this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
Hate to be glib, but I'm pretty sure it's all about e.g. Redfin and Vanguard, and that there's a sucker born every minute.
That is 100 seed rounds that never happened. Could we have learned the lessons here for less?
I'm gueessing yes; the ridiculously over-engineered [1] juice press is a good sign that efficient use of capital was just not a priority.
[1] https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensi...
It seems that they did not have enough time and money to right their ship. It is sad to see a dream die even if you don't agree with the product or business plan.
> One of the investors said they were frustrated with how the company didn’t deliver on the original pitch and that their venture firm wouldn’t have met with Evans if he were hawking bags of juice that didn’t require high-priced hardware. Juicero didn’t broadly disclose to investors or employees that packs can be hand squeezed, said four people with knowledge of the matter.
This was a dumb thing from the jump. Maybe all that money spent on an evenly-pressing juice-o-tron would have been better used almost anywhere else.
Why is that sad? They were trying to solve some made-up problem in a way that would have wasted resources and created a lot of waste. They didn't do this to make the world a better place, their goal was to get rich (which isn't immoral by itself), so why should we – as a society or as individuals – be sad that they failed?
I know this model works for coffee, but there the prefab alternative is not an option.
And shame on the VCs for not using their heads. You can't get a half pint of juice out of a pint bag of fruits and veggies.
Which reminds me of my brilliant idea of making fresh squeezed lemonade for our wedding guests. I had to cut a whole 25lb box of lemons in half and then press them into the Kitchen Aid to get about two quarts of juice. It took me hours and a lot of elbow grease to do that.
That's where the period goes.
You're right that people may have been able to stomach all that 1984 stuff if the price was low.
Anyone have any ideas on the DIY project to make from them?
[1]: Much as I hate to explain a pun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
There are problems that even $120 million can't fix.