How Juicero's Story Set the Company Up for Humiliation

I found that bullet boint list of Juicero's supposed added value the most amazing part of it all:

* - The first closed loop food safety system that allows us to remotely disable Produce Packs if there is, for example, a spinach recall. [...]

- Consistent pressing of our Produce Packs calibrated by flavor to deliver the best combination of taste and nutrition every time.

- Connected data so we can manage a very tight supply chain [...]*

So according to the CEO(!) the added value for end-users(!) is 1) DRM, 2) bullshit and 3) tracking.

My hunch is that this mindset would explain a lot of the more baffling IoT devices out there - but I haven't seen it stated so openly before.

In 2004, the Coca Cola Company tried to launch "Dasani", in the UK. Dasani is tap water run through a de-ionizing plant, after which flavoring is added. They were laughed out of the business.[1] Not only did Coca Cola not try again, they gave up on launching in France and Germany. Now that was a humiliation.

An even worse failure was Odwalla's "Killer Juice". Odwalla made a big deal about their juice being "natural" and not pasteurized. Then they had a contamination problem. One person died, 66 sick, sales down 90% afterwards. The company was eventually acquired by the Minute Maid unit of Coca Cola. All product is now pasteurized.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3809539.stm

This is perhaps a great example that proves that not all publicity is good publicity.

While they flew under the radar, they weren't widely mocked, and they might even have succeeded in building a following. After all, on face value, K-cups are similarly ridiculous, where a pricey appliance is used to make a single serving of product from an even pricier single-use packet, complete with DRM where they were locking out unofficial cups.

And yet, Keurig has sold a lot of their brewers and officially-licensed cups, and it turns out the single-serving model was an advantage rather than a drawback.

It's undeniable that Juicero's own promoters can lay on the spiritual-tinged marketing drivel thick, and they were swiftly slaughtered in the court of public opinion with one slickly-produced viral video. Perhaps the lesson is, even if your model is pure BS, don't do something that could be mocked in three minutes, and used to entertain at your expense.

I lost this when I watched this 2 minute video on how to make juice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i0UugILBJg

"Your Juicero needs to be connected to Wifi to make juice"

WTF?

They should have used the effects of artificial scarcity and marketed the pulp squeezer to offices, stores, airports, etc. There are plenty of YouTube vloggers that can stumble upon one of the squeezers at a store or an airport. Then they can sell it to consumers.

The best thing about this story is the Juicero's CEO saying that people that squeeze their pulp bags are hackers [1]

So when I saw this week’s headlines about hacking and hand-squeezing Produce Packs, I had a one overriding thought: ”We know hacking consumer products is nothing new. [...]”

and then people mocking the juice hackers as jackers on Twitter [2].

[1] https://medium.com/@Juicero/a-note-from-juiceros-new-ceo-cb2... [2] https://twitter.com/XEECEEVEVO/status/855152667722526720

Yes, it's all bogus marketing, but people mocking Juicero should be reminded that bottled water and luxury fashion goods of any kind are all multi-hundred billion dollar markets, not to mention any of the trillion (?) dollar commodity prepared foods segments. Many of these industries differentiate through intellectually-nonsensical lifestyle marketing.

from https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-20/juice-mac... :

Of course Juicero could probably make a nice living selling $8 juice packs without bothering with a fancy machine. But then it wouldn't be a tech company. One investor told Huet and Zaleski that "their venture firm wouldn’t have met with Evans if he were hawking bags of juice that didn’t require high-priced hardware." You can be a hardware company or a software company or a platform company or a cloud company or an internet-of-things company, but you can't be a food company.

It was a stupid, consumerist idea of a product. The investors deserve every penny lost on this one. In no way or fashion would this product further humanity. It only generates even more waste. Also, it's staple IoT madness with vendor-lock.

Paywalled, web link does not work for me, site hijacks back button.

I know a couple of people that work at Juicero and unlike 99% of you I've actually tried the juices. To call it a scam is harsh. There are legitimate concerns with supply chain, what foods can be mixed together because of acidity and preservation, etc. I've tried a bunch of the juices, and I didn't like many of them but I could see how people who were into the green juice would find it appealing. The pomegranate was really delicious however but The yield was really low. I don't think that's one you could just squeeze with your hands. I think they should have done a blind taste test to see if the press actually had any value over hand squeezing because some of the ingredients would be harder to squeeze.

The price used to be higher for the press, I think it was $700-800 which I thought was ridiculous. I even made the point that they could replace the press with two books and someone standing on it. The wifi connectivity was dumb and you really have to be dumb to think that was useful. The drm and "checking" of the packets was a little more than an excuse to not squeeze anything more than their own packets.

But the juice itself is definitely something that is superior if you're into that juice. I heard a ton of celebrities love it, but you can't sustain a business with just celebrities. As with most things like this, I doubt they care as much about the press as the subscription to the juice packets. Personally I think they should embrace this and come up with a line of juice packets that are hand squeezable.