Juicero May Be Feeling the Squeeze | Hacker News Reader

Juicero May Be Feeling the Squeeze

bloomberg.com

195 pointstomgallard197 comments

I'll offer a brief glimpse into the future. Juicero, burnt by the ease at which consumers rob them of potential revenue poaches someone away from the likes of HP or Gillette. That someone comes up with the perfect solution: add a coded valve to the juice bags which only opens when it has been inserted in a licensed Juicero machine. The added advantage is that the machine can refuse to squeeze more juice out of a bag which has been in the machine for more than X days, all for your protection of course.

Next thing consumers take knives to the bags to circumvent the coded valves. Bags are reinforced. Consumers use better knives. Bags are made double-walled with some nasty tasting/coloured liquid in between the two walls, all for your protection.

Next step is Juicero goes bankrupt, consumers are left with useless machines which end up on flea markets or landfills.

Rinse.

Repeat.

Me? I just eat an apple, an orange or a banana. My daughter prefers to put them through the blender first and calls it a smoothie. Takes all of a few minutes and works with apples and oranges and bananas from any source.

Indeed! And at the $400 price point you could purchase a superb blender or a good one and save $ (blender drawbacks may be the cleaning and grocery shopping when viewed as customer for Juicero who is contemplating switching) but it's far more versatile beyond the context of just consuming produce in liquid or near-liquid/smoothie form.

Juicero also wants people to wash out and mail back used juice packs so it's not really a savings either.

You should consider applying for an operations role at Juicero - the double-walled solution was truly a nice touch.

On another note, Juicero doesn't care what you or your daughter do to make juice, because you were never meant to buy a Juicero. It's a safe bet that their strategy was to sell B2B to large corporations and into the high-end hospitality industry (hotels, cruise ships, colleges) rather than B2C. I'm sure they extrapolated some crazy TAM/SAM/SOM for the B2B amenities market based on Keurig's success and used it to score an easy $120m.

No, it's built as a home appliance. If it was for the food service industry, it would be heavy stainless steel and cleanable with boiling soapy water, like everything else in that industry. And it would be faster; 10 seconds, not 2 minutes. It wouldn't look like an overgrown iPad.

It's a self-serve appliance, aka not meant to be used in a kitchen or prep room, but to be left out in common areas for customers to buy/take a bag and make their own juice, no mess no cleanup, see Keurig

Keurig markets itself to both consumers and businesses.

others like Flavia dont market to consumers though (its actually a selling point of theirs, "our machines are expensive and hence wont be purchased by consumers, so dont have to worry about people stealing your supplies")

This is like a Keurig if Keurig squeezed coffee out of pods that were full of hot liquid coffee.

You can also buy a juicer. Takes a negligible effort to clean, and with all those grocery delivery services, the slogging vegetables around part is taken care of.

That doesn't work in an office environment. The "K" coffee makers are a dream in breakrooms everywhere.

Yeah, that's a valid point. In a breakroom there is a commons and unless there's someone who maintains the commons it will get dirty and the refirgerator will get filled with rotting crap. Keurig side steps that by not needing cleaning or messy supplies. Just add paper cups and you don't even need a dishwasher.

Office break rooms solve this by having bottles of Odwalla and the like in the drinks fridge along with all the other drinks. Juicero is ostensibly fresher but, as the demonstration shows, it's really not and the quality is the same as any other cold pressed juice.

> Takes a negligible effort to clean

Which one? Not trolling, but I've bought (and returned) 3 different juices in the 300 - 500$ range that were a pain to clean, dry and put away. Even the ones made in Korea that are "only 5 parts" are annoying. I've had soft shreds getting stuck in the ejection tube, and the only way to clean it is (that I've found out) by using an ear bud to push it out.

I have a Braun MP32, bought by my parents when I was born. The thing works fine. Parts are still available, as are the machines (2nd hand but who cares?).

http://www.dasprogramm.org/electrical/household/braun-multip...

http://www.ebay.de/bhp/braun-mp-32

Yeah I use a wooden chopstick to unclog my Kuvings.

If you like the have both the pulp and juice, a high quality blender like the Vitamix is better. In this case, you just fill the jar with water and run it for 30s to clean it.

They are starting from the other side:

> The company sells produce packs for $5 to $8 but limits sales to owners of Juicero hardware. The products were only available in three states until Tuesday, when the company expanded to 17.

Useless machines have even started with Keurig.

"Owners Of Discontinued Keurig Rivo Having Trouble Buying Coffee Pods That Will Work"

https://consumerist.com/2017/02/27/owners-of-discontinued-ke...

"Reporters were able to wring 7.5 ounces of juice in a minute and a half. The machine yielded 8 ounces in about two minutes. . . The company sells produce packs for $5 to $8 . . ."

- So the machine is 6%, give or take, more efficient than hand. If I'm serving two juices a day during weekdays for me and spouse at average cost of $6.5/unit that's $0.78/day, $3.90/week, say I do this 50 weeks a year so $195 in juice recovery value (JRV) by using the machine :).

- Also saves the household example above 3 minutes of time a day by using machine. Let's say average household who can afford $8 packets of juice is in the $100k/yr club at least so time value (for sale) of $50/hr gives me an efficiency gain of 750 minutes or $625/year in Juicer Time Return (JTR).

Using machine provides one year JRV of $195 and a JTR of $625 = $820

Product cost is $400.

FOLKS you are DOUBLING YOUR MONEY!

I know you're being facetious, but the machine is actually slower than doing it by hand.

And much, much louder.

Depends on the human.

The machine takes no time though - eg 2 min of machine time is zero human cost time :)

I was sure you were joking at the GP, now I'm not sure anymore :)

You mean, I go out and get a machine, something that will take constant handling at home, and waste some precious space, so it can make juice. And as a bonus, it's slower than the no-machine alternative (so it will make me wait). And I didn't even come into the cost of finding their brand of juice for buying, instead of any other one.

I did never hear about this company before, but I'm surely not becoming their client.

Thanks for doing the analysis. I'm going to order one of these RIGHT AWAY. It's a perfect complement to my $1,500 June toaster oven!

You're forgetting to include the beneficial effects of the extra hand workout the manual juice squeezer gets. 3 minutes of squeeze per day can be offset to X minutes per day in the gym, at a cost of $Y. Add to that the increased self confidence due to the feeling of being self-reliant when it comes to juice recovery and the calculation might just tip in favour of the Luddite squeeze squad.

Check this post from almost a year ago!

http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2016/08/how-is-this-thi...

The alternative isn't squeezing their juice packs, though. The alternative is buying a carton labelled "Juice" and pulling it out of the fridge.

$100K/yr household means you can afford $8 per cup of juice at home?

Oh you mean a single person household. A bro living a one bedroom apt filled with useless gadgets type perhaps

It's the first time I hear about this product but as someone who likes fermenting vegetables this part surprised me:

>We finish by sealing the produce (completely raw and never pasteurized) into our Packs, which get shipped to your door the day they're made.

Wouldn't raw, unpasteurized chopped fruits and vegetable start fermenting very quickly in those packs? Are they shipped refrigerated?

This entire thing is so weird to me. Those packs cost around $6 each and they only produce a small glass of juice. This is less cost effective than some hipster juice bars, and at least here you don't have to clean the glass afterwards.

Buying a good juicer sounds like a much better investment, although admittedly they're probably more painful to wash up.

EDIT: after some more digging up, it turns out that the packs are delivered refrigerated. On top of that the machine will refuse to juice expired or any kind of 3rd party packs and apparently needs an internet connection and a smartphone app to function. Preposterous.

Here's the getting started video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i0UugILBJg

Step 1: open the box

Step 2: plug in the juicer

Step 3: sign up to your juicero account through the smartphone app

Honestly if you had shown me this video 2 hours ago I'd have assumed satire.

They are shipped refrigerated; that's why they're limited to only a handful of states. From the article:

> The products were only available in three states until Tuesday, when the company expanded to 17. Packs can’t be shipped long distances because the contents are perishable.

I'm also very skeptical that raw chopped vegetables can be hand squeezed in to juice. Given that the packets can be squeezed by had in to juice, that leads me to believe that the vegetables are not as unprocessed as Juicero would like me to believe.

Lemme try this - I'll chop up a bunch of spinach, kale, and carrots, place them in a reinforced bag, and squeeze them by hand. Yeah - that's not gonna give me juice...

I was wondering about that as well and found an article [1] that has pictures of an opened packet as well as after juicing [2]. To me it looks like the produce is chopped very fine, maybe a little like produce that has gone through a blender for a few seconds.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.sg/juicer-juicer-product-review-2...

[2] https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/5710e74c9105842...

Yeah my guess is that depending on the ingredients, the consistency of the bag contents will range from finely chopped produce to a pulpy slurry.

If you thought that was satire, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB-j4cz2PlA

"Two investors in Juicero were surprised to learn the startup’s juice packs could be squeezed by hand without using its high-tech machine."

This sounds almost comical...

I really hope a reference to that makes it to season 4 of HBO's Silicon Valley

It's probably too late. I'm sure they've filmed the whole thing already.

I was pouring through my mental rolodex for the episode where they do something with a juicer. I'd never heard of this Juicero but thought it sounded like something Jian Yang would be in charge of.

Juicers have a small episode arc in "The Empty Chair" !

I forget the exact line but it has something to do with "why does he have 2 juicers"

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/silicon-valley-almost-painfully...

They've mentioned in past interviews some things too ridiculous to include. This might be one.

> Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-va...

Richard looks at the floor.

Erlich has some choice vulgar things to say.

Jared chimes in with a cheery way to look at the situation.

I think that may be the best symbolic summary of the entire situation; indeed, ripe for satire.

Sounds like they're going to get squeezed out of the market...

I don't see why this matters at all -- the disposable juice packs are what extract money from the consumer. It's the razor / replacement blade or printer / ink model. If someone finds out that they really only need the blades, ink, or juice packs, it's no big deal.

The problem for the manufacturer comes when consumers figure out that they can use knock-off blades, generic ink, or 3rd party juice packs.

The problem is that they raised A LOT of VC money and it was supposed to be tech startup that creates a network effect and dominate the market.

Gillette model worked because creating that infrastructure back then had a huge barrier to entry. You had to get a factory to produce the blades, etc.

Compare that to juice mix delivery service in 2017. There are tons of organic juice stores around, and there are tons of delivery services like uber/caviar/doordash. These juiceries can take advantage of the distribution startups to deliver their juice and make money if they wanted.

Basically it matters because you need to take "competition" into consideration. It's an entirely different game than razor blades.

Except the razor is $400 here. It's not a throwaway device like a razor or a printer.

To be fair, plenty of printers are >$400

Ah, but those are generally not throw-away products. There is an inverse relationship between the one-off cost for the printer and the per-page cost for the supplies: cheap printer, expensive supplies <-> Expensive printer, cheap supplies.

This machine is expensive and the supplies are expensive. That... does not make sense. Given that the supplies seem to be delivered by means of some subscription service they'd have done better to throw in the machine for some nominal monthly cost - and make it free for those who manage to consume more than X bags of pulp per year. This also would lower the threshold for potential customers as it would be possible to try the 'service' without needing to invest a large sum up-front. Given that the money is meant to be in the bags it only makes sense to try to maximise the number of customers.

I guess they had a look at Apple and thought their business model - expensive hardware tied to a single supplier in as many ways as possible - would fit them as well. It doesn't, not when you can pick actual apples from a tree in your garden.

There's something to be said about being able to squeeze your own juice that, at least in my mind, makes it feel like the juice is fresh.

How many people do you know that drag the razor across their face without the handle? Sure it's where the profit comes from, but you do need the two parts to have a consumer story. Otherwise they'd just sell the blades and drop the ruse.

They also sell disposable blades with disposable handles attached to them.

https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/19/15357290/juicero-400...

'Juicero’s business plan reads like a pitch-perfect parody of contemporary startup culture. One investor told Bloomberg that Juicero was building a “platform” for a new model of food delivery. ...The technology is mostly superfluous from the customer’s perspective. But the technology dimension was crucial for fundraising. As one investor put it to Bloomberg, “Their venture firm wouldn’t have met with [Juicero founder Doug] Evans if he were hawking bags of juice that didn’t require high-priced hardware.”'

> I don't see why this matters at all

Given the opportunity, how much of your own money would you invest?

Vendor lock-in. You buy the razor because you want to use the blades, you buy the blades because you already have the razor. If you've got $400 in sunk cost sitting on your kitchen counter, you're far more likely to buy the proprietary pouches and far less likely to buy a carton of juice from the grocery store. That psychology is integral to the business model, it's what creates the promise of sustainable high margins. Nobody invests $120m in a startup juice company with no market share.

Well, to be strictly fair, the packs are not supposed to be of juice, but fresh-chopped solid produce. (https://www.juicero.com/how-it-works/) It's not clear how much the investors knew before this, but Juicero's clearly been misrepresenting their system to the public.

The single most "Silicon Valley is a bubble" paragraph I've ever seen:

Doug Evans, the company’s founder, would compare himself with Steve Jobs in his pursuit of juicing perfection. He declared that his juice press wields four tons of force—“enough to lift two Teslas,” he said. Google’s venture capital arm and other backers poured about $120 million into the startup. Juicero sells the machine for $400, plus the cost of individual juice packs delivered weekly. Tech blogs have dubbed it a “Keurig for juice.”

I've got bingo!

> Juicero declined to comment. A person close to the company said Juicero is aware the packs can be squeezed by hand but that most people would prefer to use the machine because the process is more consistent and less messy.

"We kinda didn't think about this much because the real money is in the packets anyways. This stuff is way better than ink cartridges."

True, but the proprietary tech in the machine was supposed to be a form of defensible advantage for this business. If the product value comes entirely from chopping and delivering vegetables in a bag, it wouldn't be hard for others to replicate.

Hello, darkness my old friend. The analogies to Keurig won't stop here -- next up, DRM juice packs.

Sounds like they already have that: the machine reads QR codes and compares them to an online service for expiry/recall. Not many steps to validity.

Already done.

>The device also reads a QR code printed on the back of each produce pack and checks the source against an online database to ensure the contents haven’t expired or been recalled, the person said.

I really hate what those machines have done to coffee. It's difficult to explain to people at work, family, and friends how they paid a premium to be overcharged and produce extra waste without coming off like a jerk. I miss getting up from my machine and filling my mug with a regular coffee pot.

They do have one nice advantage over the office or home coffee pot, forgetful people and no warming surface. It does prevent some fires because you have people who forget the basic things.

That is something to be concerned about, but even rudimentary coffee pots have automatic shutoffs and most have other safety measures. Plus even with the long running heating element, they draw much less power than Keurigs. They bother me, but I usually keep my opinion to myself because people get emotionally invested in strong purchases (which coffee has become thanks Keurig).

In an office setting (especially outside of the morning rush), it can also make sense to have an easy and mess-free way for people to make individual servings. I suppose there are scenarios at home too but they make mediocre coffee and are expensive and wasteful. Maybe in a non-coffee drinking house where guests occasionally want one cup.

I think it's the mounds of used single cups I see in our trash every day that bothers me, not to mention how much the company spends for them.

I was very amused one day in one of Sun's offices to see a big eco friendly poster of some sort--this was during their green computing kick--right above one of these pod/packet machines.

It's tough in a big office though unless someone's keeping the coffee made and fresh as is the case in a meeting setting. People take the last cup and don't make fresh coffee or they just don't want to wait.

We have both a coffeemaker with thermoses and a pod coffeemaker which seems a reasonable compromise.

Keurig can't be described as "mess free." We have one and work and the machine spews coffee all over itself and, of course, the place you put the pods and the spout gets all gunked up and nobody cleans it. It's pretty gross. Same thing happened with the old one so it's not just one model.

>Maybe in a non-coffee drinking house where guests occasionally want one cup.

I have a $20 drip pot that makes 1-2 cups and takes up a quarter of the counter space. French press is even cheaper and I have one that makes only a single cup. Then there's aeropress...

If that's such a concern a weight sensor with automatic shutoff would be much cheaper and just as effective. My $20 pot has an automatic timed shutoff.

I know that I'm paying a premium and that the coffee isn't as good as what else I could make.

I'm paying for time. I can just press a button and have coffee in ~1 minute. No need to grind beans or clean the coffeemaker after.

Worth it for me.

Using K-cup reusable filters enable people to grind their own coffee. I wish that they would have started with this model instead of the singular disposable cups that produced lots of garbage. But then there's no money in saving mother nature I guess. :|

So no-juice-for-you when the internet goes down. Brilliant.

> The analogies to Keurig won't stop here

The elevator pitch to investors for this is probably "Keurig for organic juice".

proprietary? You mean marry a CRUD app with a mechanical device that presses a bit?

Why not just sell the packets. $5-8 dollars for a juice pack is already bonkers

As a daily veggie shake juicer, I'd be interested in packs that could cut down on the time I spend each morning cutting stuff up, if cost effective. But I get no satisfaction from status symbols, anymore than I care that my household appliance barely found a reason to connect to my wifi.

My supermarket sells precut fruits and veggies already.

> As a daily veggie shake juicer

Does not really compute with

> I get no satisfaction from status symbols

Agreed. I'd 100% buy one of those packets. No need for the silly machine.

Perceptual lock-in. Customers feel like once they've spent the money on the machine, it makes sense to keep buying the packs.

It's a form of the sunk cost fallacy that's frequently exploited in marketing.

Yeah, I don't get the big deal. If the packs are profitable, who cares if they use your machine? If they're not, you're doomed anyway.

I don't understand this product at all. If you're willing to buy a pack of prepared juice, why not just buy a bottle of juice instead?

Like a V8...this product is for hipsters.

Wealth signalling I presume.

The bottle of juice wouldn't let you discard a capri-sun package full of squeeze fruit husks. This lets people know you're wealthy enough to not care about excess.

Yeah, as far as I could tell this is more expensive, less convenient, and harder to obtain than juice bottles, takes up more space, and the consumables have about the same shelf life or shorter. Bizarre product. (Also, since it requires an internet connection to check if the juice packs are valid, if the internet goes down and you decide that's a good time to take a juice break...)

To be fair, that "internet goes down" aspect can be mitigated in software by pushing IDs of the packages that were ordered for your account to the machine as soon as they are known.

Why not simply encode the expiry date itself into the qr codes, then just decode that using software on the device. Even better, stamp a human readable date on the package like every other grocery product. Oh but then they couldn't track your usage and juicing habits! And you'd have to be able to read or something.

Furthermore, I admittedly mostly use fruit but tossing what I need into a blender is not a big deal. A lot of what you need is in the supermarket freezer section these days. And if that's too much work, there are (of course) smoothie ingredient subscription services. https://www.wellandgood.com/good-food/daily-harvest-vs-green...

I read that vitamins in juice break down over time rather quickly. Juicero is supposed to be as fresh as possible, and therefore be nutritious and taste better than anything in a bottle.

I can't speak to the actual differences, though. I'm not really a juice person unless rum or tequila is involved.

Sure, their juice is fresh, so it's better than most non fresh bottled juice. But you can buy bottles of fresh juice. It goes bad fast, but so do these bags of juice. I'm really not seeing how this product is anything but a con to take advantage of people who don't realise that a well marketed solution isn't necessarily better than what you already had.

I can't imagine finely chopped/pulverized fruits/veggies lose vitiman content any slower than juiced fruits/veggies.

They claimed (or at least implied) that you'd be buying something closer to raw hunks of fruit and vegetables in the bag, so it would be fresh.

I'm sad they didn't test how fast they could empty the juice container with the aid of scissors.

It's also unfortunate that a ridiculous, overpriced, bag squeezing machine keeps getting the charitable label "juicer".

Then there's this $1500 toaster oven. https://juneoven.com/the-oven

In all fairness, most of the reviews are fairly positive. Though this takedown is pretty hilarious: https://www.fastcodesign.com/3065667/this-1500-toaster-oven-...

What do the contents of a juice pack look like prior to juicing? As far as I know, it's not possible to manually extract meaningful amounts of juice from leafy greens or root vegetables (e.g., spinach, romaine, kale, beets, ginger) so the ingredients must be processed before going into the packs.

Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't cut one open to exam the contents. That being said, I think a rolling pin would probably work on leafy greens.

Quote from another article (with some pics):

Juicero workers receive truckloads of produce from nearby organic farms, triple-wash it, then chop it into specific shapes. A specialized machine then fills each pack, ready to be shipped. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/business/juicero-juice-sy...

Customer(?) with an open bag: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cfj8DI-UEAAGi5F.jpg

That looks like a waste nightmare.

> The only element not recyclable by municipal methods are the Packs themselves

> Request a prepaid shipping label from by clicking the “Get Started” button below. We will then collect the Packs...

https://www.terracycle.com/en-US/brigades/juicero

Isn't it though? On top of not only the waste you have the waste of shipping/transportation.

> Step One: Cut off the bottom section of the Pack and remove the pulp

> Step Two: Rinse the Pack.

> Step Three: Set the Pack aside until you’re ready to recycle.

> Step Four: MAIL THEM IN Request a prepaid shipping label from by clicking the “Get Started” button below.

At this point I'm better off not only saving money, packaging and associated shipping pitfalls but saving time by simply juicing everything myself at home and buying produce when I make my regular trips to the grocery store.

The worst part is that if a pack is too old, the machine won't squeeze it for you! So people just throw them out. That's how my friend figured out you can just squeeze them by hand.

"The only element not recyclable is literally the entire actual product."

I love how companies word things.

Common sense is not so common any more.

Marketing does a great job on pointing out that great big nothing and people recite the marketing material without any critical thinking.

I think this waste/recycling thing is more of a SV/HN concern. Keurig tried to introduce a recyclable pod, called the Vue when their previous patent expired for k-cups. Seems to be a massive failure. Also HelloFresh and Blue Apron seem to get brought up a lot here for being hard to recycle and generaring a lot of trash, dozens of people I know have used these services and not one has mentioned the trash issue.

Nonsense, IMHO. I am a programmer and I like technology but I'm a million miles away from Silicon Valley geographically, conceptually and spiritually. Waste affects every part of life, although technology seems to produce more than its fair share.

Your friends don't care about environmental concerns. My friends do. Swings and roundabouts.

There is another thing about this machine which is not recyclable: your investment in the thing itself. The second-hand value of these will be close to zero.

Anybody else get flashbacks to the Tom Hanks movie Big where using the mentality of a kid renders all the focus group and marketing analytic charts, well, kind of irrelevant. "Who wants to play with a building?" correlates to "Why don't I just squeeze this weird Capri-Sun pack thingy into the cup?" pretty nicely to me. Neat to see this, kind of humorous in a non-catastrophic way. It's not like the machine catches fire or explodes. This is...just life.

"The New York franchise drew rave reviews from the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow."

This is absolutely not a phrase I would want to see in an article about my startup.

If you are intending to sell your startup, I can see it being quite helpful.

Gwyneth Paltrow is an important influencer in the target market for an organic juice-as-a-service startup, so it makes a whole lot of sense as a positive thing for this startup.

Obviously, less useful for startups in other markets.

You've never heard of Goop? Gwyneth Paltrow is HUGE. People buy the things she recommends, simple as that. You might not, but there's several armies' worth of gym-going, juice-drinking women who hang onto her every word.

If I was starting a business just to make money, I'd love to have Paltrow's endorsement. But I'm not wired that way. I value integrity and science too much -- probably to my financial detriment.

Is this the trailer for season 4 of HBO's silicon valley? It sure could be

So what's actually inside the packs, very fine bits of wet plant matter? Is there any real benefit of this over just selling bottles of fancy juice?

That's a fine question.

Because you can't eventually DRM a bottle.

Sure, but from the customer's perspective, why is this product necessary?

I was thinking (in all seriousness from anyone around that had used this product), how on earth is that healthier than eating or squeezing 2-3 oranges? Apart from the convenience. Do those bags really maintain the vitamins etc or is it just a "healthy alternative to soft drinks"?

I've searched, and they don't have an answer. Not even in their FAQ. They just say "pressed by us" or "cold pressed juice" but never elaborate.

The same thing I was left wondering. What's the point here with $400 machine and juices 5-8 dollars per serving? I'm sure they could get some thousands of users, but how on earth could this be worth such a large investment?

must be one sweet powerpoint presentation

The key idea is already in the second sentence of TFA:

"The product was an unlikely pick for top technology investors, but they were drawn to the idea of an internet-connected device that transforms single-serving packets of chopped fruits and vegetables into a refreshing and healthy beverage."

Keywords: IoT, single-serving refill packs, healthy fuit & veg.

further details reveal that the thing will track you at every single use pinging the central servers. It has a kill-switch to refuse juicing when they don't think you should be juicing anymore (for now expired package, but hey, nothing prevents updated from refining the "feature").

Need I continue?

Overall, it's a product that just rides the hype of juicing and IoT, but it's at least as nasty as the !#@%!# cloudpets [1].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/02/creepy-iot-teddy-be...

For them, sure, the idea is surely interesting. But for the end-user? Why would anyone go for this over just ..buying a bottle of juice? It doesn't sound like this would be freshly pressed or anything, just from a weird container.

Literally just the juice, the device doesn't even add water or anything. It's a $400 bag squeezer.

This is not a product for me but to be the devil's advocate for this post - a.) single serving in one packaged delivered to customer - no need to take time out of day/week to shop/hand select, also, sometimes hard to get serving size right if doing it manually b.) package is squeezed on device - no need to clean blender/juicer/prep utensils/prep fruits/vegetables c.) slightly fresher than buying juice in bottle in store, and don't have to go to store

'He said the company is a “platform” for a new model of food delivery, where fresh fruits and veggies are delivered regularly to the home'

For the past five years, I have gotten a box of fresh fruits and veggies delivered every Monday. The produce is organic, often local, always tasty, the box they come in is reusable, and it doesn't have DRM (that I'm aware of).

Edit: “Williams, a self-proclaimed health-food evangelist, said she’d like to see the company sell packs by themselves to people who can’t afford the device”

Can't spare $400 for the device? How about $5-$8 for 8 oz of fresh juice? Make sure to put it into a paper cup with a lid and a straw so we can maximize the amount of waste generated (along with the juice packet).

But... what is the point of a juicer if the contents you are juicing are already liquid?

I am in a state of panic right now because I cannot fathom how a group of people thought this was a good enough idea long enough for them to develop a final product. What????

They say it's "single-serving packets of chopped fruits and vegetables" not juice.

...but there's no way that you can generate enough force with just your hands to turn chopped fruit into liquid, though. It must be mostly-liquid already for that to work, right?

Ya, that's the real point. They are lying. If anything, it's full of pre-juiced chopped fruits and vegetables.

Yeah so I don't know what's going on. For some bizarre reason they didn't cut one open before squeezing. So we don't know.

Wow, I can't even... this is comedy gold:

>four tons of force

>delivered weekly

>QR code

>online database

>patent-pending

>400 custom parts

>scanner

>microprocessor

>wireless chip

>wireless antenna

>revolutionary machine

>subscription model

>“platform” for ... food delivery,

Guys, we are talking about a juicer here.

Its the "unix toaster" of the 21st century although, to be fair to the unix toaster, at least DRM was not one of its requirements.

http://www.danielsen.com/jokes/objecttoaster.txt

> Guys, we are talking about a juicer here.

It's not even that! It's literally just a $400 machine to squeeze out the contents of a bag. It comes pre-juiced in the packets!

$400 for a machine that in the end doesn't give you freshly squeezed juice? I think a lot of the appeal from squeezing fruit juice is using actual pieces of fruit.

It's apparently "single-serving packets of chopped fruits and vegetables"

But I think that's the crux of the matter, although the article fails to hit the nail on the head.

The marketing was completely misleading. The bags seem to be filled with prepared, liquid juice.

You don't need a machine because they are just sending out Capri sun bags of juice.

The machine is just a lie to make you think something is being prepared fresh.

In some sense, this is an example of Natural Selection in Silicon valley. Idiots get weeded out after wasting some VC money. Part of me feels amused by this.

This is what happens when all the most important innovation is illegal (housing, health, and transportation) and increasing shares of income goes to the top 0.01%. Innovators run out of real things to innovate on, and start creating 400$ bags of juice. You should Look forward to seeing more of this in the coming decades.

Never change sv

It would have been better if it was revealed in a plot point on Silicon Valley.

I'm still trying to figure out if this is a viral marketing campaign for season 4.

"He owned a cup which served also has a bowl for food but threw it away when he saw a boy drinking water from his hands and realized one did not even need a cup to sustain oneself."

Is that from the biography of Rob Rhinehart?

I bet you could also use a straw and drink it right out of the pouch!

That's honestly a good enough idea already, especially if the pouch was recyclable. Then the straw could be metal (reusable) with a pointy end to pierce the pouch. Boom, solid business to have 10 of these pouches delivered weekly.

Hipster CapriSun?

Was wondering why not just use a hand-operated lever press, like the sort of low-tech cast-iron device you might find on an old farmhouse.

Then realized this was the concept for the hipster Juicero.

Sometimes the real customer is investors willing to give millions to an idea and the real product is a company that looks investable.

The thing used to cost $700.[1] $400 is the new, lower price.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/17/14296530/juicero-juicer-pr...

This whole thing sounds like a sitcom parody.

Huh, I wonder if this was just with certain juice bags, or if they generally pulverize the materials in the bags to make it easier to squeeze. I can easily see this for berries, citrus, etc, but it seems less likely for beets, kale, and other hardier vegetables.

Regardless, their actual market has always been restaurants and offices that want to have juice without a mess or someone who knows how to make it, and that seems less impacted, if perhaps less appealing to their investors.

The bags don't have anything other than juice in them.

edit: Or maybe finely chopped stuff. Unclear. I would think they wouldn't bother putting stuff like orange pulp in the bags though.

but if you can squeeze the juice by hand, its just juice. They're selling a $400 machine that squeezes a packet for you.

Life imitates art i guess

It says it has chopped raw vegetables and fruits in the packets. They would need to add fruits with lots of juice to compensate for vegetables that need more liquid to be juiced fully like beets or carrots.

In the video, we see a reporter squeezing green juice out of a bag. Presumably pre-pureed kale or spinach.

A "juice luminary" - Silicon Valley writes itself!

Alright, someone needs to make a hand cranked version of the juicer now. You could probably 3D print one on the cheap and open source the specs.

I'm waiting for the part where we find out the contents of the packets are from bottles of Odwalla purchased at the local grocery store.

Juicero also expects customers to cut open the juice packs, trash/compost the pulp, wash them out, then ship them back in a box for recycling. It's more work than just using a blender.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i0UugILBJg&t=1m53s

Can someone solve the added waste and transportation problem these companies (Juicero, Blue Apron, etc...) have created by using home deliveries and lots of specialty packaging? Yes, some perishable food delivery services offer recycling but you're still left with the transportation issue.

The waste and transportation is easy to solve: just don't use these companies. Go back to the old-fashioned way of obtaining your food from the store.

The real problem would need solving (and I'm not sure it really does, because how popular are these things, really?) is people's desire for these wasteful services.

I kind of wish stores would just sell pre-cut vegetables. There HAS to be a way to do this en masse. The pre-cut kale at whole foods is almost ALWAYS sold out. Not to speak of the cauliflower "rice" that people actually battle over at Trader Joes.

If stores stocked these kinds of pre-cut veg, that would take 3/4 of the pain out of cooking.

My local mid-range grocery store sells peeled garlic, containers of chopped onions and other vegetables and fruits. It's great for people who want to save time or lack the dexterity to do it easily on their own. I personally don't buy them because I can and don't mind doing it myself.

Well, maybe it's even better than the original concept: now you can consume the product even if you don't have the hardware. As long as the juice is good - why not. They just need to start selling their juice packs to those who don't own the device.

Yes, but they're also out $400 on every customer. And those customers can now very easily switch to a different juice provider without losing any "investment" they made in hardware.

I can't find any info on their site about subscription pricing (always a red flag) but this whole thing seems absurdly stupid. I'd be amazed if they managed to scale this in such a way that shipping refrigerated juice to individual customers is more affordable than people picking it up in the store/receiving it with their normal grocery order.

The juice bags are DRM'd (yes, seriously): http://boingboing.net/2017/03/15/a-juicer-that-wont-make-jui...

can they DRM your hands?

Convenience at the hospitality level makes sense. That said, there is room for a squeezer with 396 less parts in sub-$200 range that provides empty open-top squeeze funnel bags. Allowing end user or companies to fill and dispense whatever..

why not have a bag of preselected fruit (unjuiced), you attach it to the juicer which has a fan to keep it from pulverising the plastic, and the fan stops when the blade has fully stopped spinning. and then you just have to wash the blade.

You better patent that. Actually... I CALL IT. No take-backsies.

That is, in fact, pretty much how the first-to-file US patent system works today.

I'm surprised to see google ventures in here:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/juicero

Anyone have better knowledge of these VC firms?

Surely what they need is some way it can be consumed straight from the pack?

Can't they replace online database with asymmetric cryptography in that QR code? This way a machine can validate manufacturing date even offline, i.e. more reliably.

But then how do they recall contaminated pouches?

Depends.

If it’s contaminated ‘coz expired, it’s doable. Many devices have accurate real-time clocks even offline, e.g. GPS. It’s easy to include the expiry date in that cryptographically-signed data. BTW, Kerberos protocol does similar things with their timestamps.

If however it’s contaminated just because the producer decided to recall a batch of their product, then yes, a centralized server is a good choice.

These guys must have sold investors hard for Google to put 120 million into this. Maybe there is an angle here I'm not seeing.

keurig for juice? this is not what the world needs. http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/04/news/k-cups-keurig-inventor-...

this sounds like what lexmark do (used to do?) with printer cartridges, most of the electronics in the cartridge and you have to buy a new cartridge costing more than the original printer with a half full cartridge.

This isn't a juicer as much as a juice dispenser.

how much value do the venture capitalists add?

hilarious

$120m from investors none of whom were aware you don't need a $400 machine to squeeze the juice from fruit?

How do people with so little sense get so much money?

Because they sell to people with more money than sense.

Like the Campbell Soup company, for example:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/juicero/investors

Is that a reference to the investors they are selling too, or the target market of the product? Because I can see that working either way.

I'm not bothered by the fact that these guys got investment, it's an interesting idea and could have been a great kickstarter. But, $120 mil is a staggering amount for a company like this that should have relatively small startup costs.

Well, it probably cost a ton of money to convince people they need to spend $400 on a machine to squeezes the juice out of expensive packets.

Market your way out of the problem, I like it.

Inheritance

And more importantly, will they invest in my $1,000 wifi enabled can opener?

it uses the blockchain!

As the saying goes, if you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to.

>> an internet-connected device that transforms single-serving packets of chopped fruits and vegetables into a refreshing and healthy beverage.

Wow, internet connected? I just can't understand this craze to connect anything and everything to internet.

"we want to know EVERYTHING about you", what you do, eat, drink, watched (smartTVs getting screenshots), listened (see BOSE article), make love (iCon), self-satisfy (iVibrate - or whatever it was called), when did you use the toilet (formerly known as "playing angry birds for 10mins) and this is the main purpose of IoT devices..

Looks like people/companies don't focus on how to solve a problem and make money from the solution but more like how they can get into our homes and monetize on the activities recorded.

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