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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

Don't mean to be contrary here, but why do all of these "back to nature food" things seem, upon closer inspection, to factor down being a way for rich people to once again give mother earth another good poke in the eye with a sharp, plastic, non-degradable stick?

How is this not just Keurig-ing the process of tossing veggies from the local into your blender into a cross-country, plastic-generating, fuel-burning waste-a-thon to prove how very extra-special and enlightened you are? C'mon. Chi? Life force? In a disposable plastic pouch dropped off by Fed-Ex? Dawkins would have a field day.

Sorry for the rant.

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That's exactly what it is, K-Cups of juice, and it's genius. People love throwing things away instead of cleaning.

And like K-Cups, Juicero has already created a system to lock out generic veggie bags past their patent with the barcode scan to check freshness.

The $700 might be worth it if you were able to use your own reusable veggie squash bag, in addition to their premixes. But, it seems like the smart machines themselves might be sold at-cost if they've built out a distribution network for expensive pouches.

$700 is selling them at cost? Seems terribly unlikely

> The $700 might be worth it if you were able to use your own reusable veggie squash bag

Just buy a Juicer - there are plenty on the market.

The point of this is so you don't have to peel the produce yourself, it comes nicely prepacked for you - for a modest extra fee of course.

>> Don't mean to be contrary here

>> How is this not just Keurig-ing the process of tossing veggies from the local into your blender

Not contrarian at all. From TFA:

"Finally, there are the environmental questions about the single-serve model pioneered by coffee companies such as Keurig and Nespresso, which creates a throwaway container with each serving. Every glass of Juicero juice needs its own pack, which gets shipped from Los Angeles to the customer, although Mr. Evans said he was developing a compostable pack."

> "but why do all of these "back to nature food" things seem, upon closer inspection, to factor down being a way for rich people to once again give mother earth another good poke in the eye with a sharp, plastic, non-degradable stick?"

I had a similar impression when reading this article. It sounded dystopian to me -- a way to extract money from people with little sense, while not providing much benefit, and offsetting whatever benefit is provided with an oddly high-waste product. I'm sure there are people who see this as a positive value proposition, but it seems to me that it's worse than every alternative -- less convenient and more expensive than pre-bottled juice (even the probiotic stuff that tastes like yard waste), considerably more wasteful than frozen concentrate, lower-quality output than throwing veggies from your local stand into a blender. "Chi" and "life force" are poor substitutes.

The difference is that this uses pressing to get the juice instead of cutting/blending. There is a lot of information out there about how pressing is better, but I am unsure how much of it is bullshit.

Getting a good pressing machine to use at home is a couple to few hundred dollars. Plus it's time consuming to buy the veggies, cut them yourself, get out the presser and assemble the pieces, feed the veggies into the presser, wait for it to press, then clean all the pressing pieces and put it back away. The entire process minus shopping for veggies is probably 10-15 minutes.

Some of it is definitely bullshit. From the article:

>“Organic cold-pressed juice is rainwater filtered through the soil and the roots and the stems and the plants,” he said. “You extract the water molecules, the chlorophyll, the anthocyanin and the flavonoids and the micronutrients. You’re getting this living nutrition. It’s like drinking the nectar of the earth.”

The water molecules, eh? Bet those are better for being cold-pressed. Also all that essential chlorophyll that we absolutely need in our diet...

Because the ones you don't hear about don't have the profit margins to sustain a massive advertising/marketing budget.

It's the mechanism by which advertising becomes a tremendously negative signal to me: if you can afford to spend that much money pushing your product, you're extracting a large price premium over your costs and my value.

It's only occasionally wrong.

You get veggies from the pub?

You don't? Beer's the ultimate veggie!

the underlying goal of industry and commerce doesn't change, advertising buzzwords run in cycles.

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