Why Juicero’s Press Is So Expensive
blog.bolt.io
blog.bolt.io
What we see in most products is a result of the accountants saying "no" to too much. Cheap parts, assembled cheaply, pennies saved per part. What we see here is the exact opposite: the accountants didn't say "no" nearly often enough. Apple manufactures custom everything because they can, and because they sell at massive scales. Juicero wanted to be Apple quality without selling at Apple quantity.
I fully believe you get a better cup of juice squeezing with their massive press rather than by hand because it can press over a bigger surface. I also believe it doesn't matter a bit, because this is a worthless piece of equipment. Beautiful engineering, though.
A $15 pasta roller can probably come pretty close.
(OTOH, it would be annoying if it exploded)
saddest part is that we are getting cheap fly-by-night puffy pieces. HN used to only alow the expensive ones on wired to pass. This community is dying :(
Or maybe, just maybe, a screw-driven piston, like many actual juicers have...
But let's be completely honest - the machine was always meant to be an expensive countertop device. It looks expensive, it weighs a lot, people will think you spent a lot of money on it even if they don't know how much it'll cost... This is exactly why the engineering staff was told "go nuts" on the hardware design - the more expensive and custom, the better. It does the job of looking like a high-end appliance exactly and precisely, and really nothing more.
This company always intended to make its money back selling overpriced juice packs like Keurig, banking on people with more money than common sense buying and using the hell out of these devices for the $14 juice packs. Selling the machines near cost or even as a loss leader was perfectly acceptable, as long as customers had to come back to them for more juice month over month. It just turns out consumers were smart enough to see through the not-so-clever ruse of buying a $400 counterweight to squeeze a package of pre-squeezed juice out of a bag and into a cup...
Keurig is great at one thing: making the worst coffee this
world has to offer
Having heard this from a number of coffee fans, I suspect you're not the market Keurig really targets. Rather I suspect we non-coffee-drinkers might be the primary buyers. We want something that will sit innocuously in the kitchen, looking good and doing nothing, on the off chance that we'll be expected to provide coffee for someone. We don't know how to buy coffee, we don't know how to prepare it, and we don't know how to clean up after preparing it. Also, we don't care to know any of those things. So, here's a something we made for you that came out of a fancy package. Now we're going to throw away this little plastic cup.
Now for espresso or the like, well that is a different story. We used to have an espresso machine but it was quite a pain (and took up space). For that the machines are great. We have the Nespresso machine with the milk attachment. Makes a pretty good cup. They provide mailing bags for you to send back the used cups? carts? (hum) for recycling.
Expresso machines are complex and bulky, and they generally aren't worth it unless you can spend $600+ (and that plus goes WAY up). Nespresso isn't bad at all (we have one here at work), but even better is a Lavazza machine, which takes cartridges like the Nespresso, but the resulting espresso is an order of magnitude better, in my opinion.
I'm a tea drinker myself, but have one around to serve decent espresso to people that want it.
The polite thing to do would be to accept the coffee or not, without placing conditions on the host, or implying that their hospitality is possibly beneath your standards.
After a couple of those, everybody knows your taste :D
If all you have is instant, you're better off not offering anything. That stuff is generally terrible.
I'd rather have a cup of Nespresso coffee than a fresh brewed cup of stale ground coffee.
Many larger food stores and most specialty coffee shops sell coffee beans by weight and will grind them for you. So you can easily by just a small amount at a time if you want.
I guess you've never had coffee out of a rarely serviced machine in the break room of a millwrighting shop.
Keurig coffee is the smoothest brew ever compared to some of the terrible coffee I've gladly drank over the years.
Keurigs do a perfectly fine job by comparison.
15A 330V DC motor? To squish a bag of pulp?
The best things I've gotten career and skill wise from more senior engineers has been the feedback where they looked at a design and said "looks fancy, but what were you thinking?".
This machine looks like it needed some more grizzled manufacturing veterans to inject some sense into the design process.
That thing is so over-engineered it is almost as if it was a joke.
Maybe we can out-do them and build a hydraulic version: "Now with 50 tons of pressure". I have a hydro pack lying around here somewhere with a really neat 3" puck piston. I'm sure that would do the job just fine and maybe even a little bit quicker.
Two teslas is 40000 newtons. If we assume the press moves 5cm in 2.5 minutes:
40000 * (0.05/150) = 13 watts.
Hey if any VC is listening I'm willing to sell this idea. Only asking $10M.
Maybe different people use that term differently but I wouldn't call that 'over-engineered'. I'd just call it 'poorly engineered'. Mismatched components doing a poor job despite being far more expensive than necessary. If they'd put a well designed hydraulic press in there, I'd call it over-engineered. :)
There's somehow too much happening for this 2013 device to handle.
FWIW, easily 85-90% of what I try and open on my old Kindle (the super-basic version from a few years ago) makes the browser - and sometimes the whole UI - completely seize up. I'm guessing (based on how everything gets super sluggish) they didn't enable swapping - which does make total sense, but then the device only has 256MB(?) of RAM......
Now I'm curious what the iPad's virtual memory settings are like. And whether swap on Flash (of the caliber that goes in an iPad) is a good idea!
Just a stream of consciousness set of notes from my reading of the article though:
* The design of the interior machined parts looks like a classic case of why machinists make fun of / mildly dislike engineers. "As long as I can make it in a 3D model we can make it out of metal, right?" They're beautiful, but if a part is going to be hidden from your end user, maybe think about how much manufacturing time those artistic rounded fillets are going to take up and design something that can be run on a 3 axis machine instead of a five axis machine.
* That injection molding. Wow. I'm kind of in two minds about that, because I can at least get behind the idea of spending time and money on the part of a machine your customers will be touching and seeing every day but good lord is it expensive, especially for low volume boutique products.
* The gear system. I'm surprised to see a set of spur gears in there vs a planetary gear set. Planetary gears are quiet and space efficient while also being able to transmit large loads. I'm surprised there actually wasn't a gearbox manufacturer from the cordless drill industry (another high input speed -> high output torque device) that they could tap to get a already designed and mass produced gear-train for much less money.
I haven't done injection molding, but I know that making the molds is the expensive part. Once you've made the molds, making parts is cheap. If there was an overoptimistic market projection, the mold cost per part would seem low.
There's a fairly common arrangement for presses where a motor drives a worm gear which drives a ring gear with a threaded or ball screw hole. Here's a consumer-appliance grade version from China, used in an oil press, pasta extruder, or juicer.[1][2] $2 in quantity 500. The first thing to do in mechanical design is to find out what you can buy.
[1] https://honestmotor.en.alibaba.com/product/1971456634-222573... [2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/220v-dc-worm-gear-mot...
If they were going for Apple-level tolerances, they're walking into a minefield.
I actually untangled a mess like that (only it was some 200+ VMs on 20 fancy HP blades + SAN to serve 5000 users daily), don't even joke about it.
If you arrived with something the size of a semi-trailer to squeeze some juice people would likely ask you if you're all ok in the upper department but if you do the same in computer land they call you 'architect' and promote you. So much of that complexity is hidden and your average business owners have no clue what is required and what is overkill.
There's also a bias in which ones we read about. Nobody puts the age of a 40 year old founder in a headline.
I think PG wrote an essay on why ycombinator started out primarily accepting new graduates, but I can't find it right now. Clearly he had a different take.
It only becomes a problem when you need to stop burning money, because you can't easily reduce the hardware cost.
Do you guys actually feel that way or is the startupspeak getting to us?
If I interpret your parent post correctly, their opinion is than it's not at all reasonable to accept such low salaries.
It's just that there are apparently more than enough fools who do it anyway, until they learn that this is both unwise and unsustainable.
I know plenty of young engineers who are easily socking away 60 - 70% of their post tax income because they basically need a futon to sleep on and a macbook and don't really have many needs. After 5 years or so, they'll have half a million in the bank free and clear which is hard to do anywhere else in the country.
Now add it a spouse who works in non-profits or is a schoolteacher or any other job that's not tech. Now your expenses have risen 2x but your collective earnings has only risen 1.3x and now you're only saving 20% of your income.
Add in a kid and your expenses go up another 50% and your income rises not a jot and all of a sudden, you're in the hole and heading into debt.
Low cost/low compensation locations completely flip this equation around since there's no huge disparity in earnings and large families are less of a relative strain.
Neither is intrinsically better or worse than the other, they simply suit different lifestyles better.
I think most people would love to live in a world where that's true but it's pretty far from where we are.
> Salary shouldn't be dependent on (desired) living conditions, but on experience and value added
That's leaving out half of the equation: value added sets the upper bound for what a company can afford to pay you but they're going to negotiate down to make a profit. The seller has the same maximum cap but they're going to negotiate up and fixed costs are a key part of that – since in reality food, housing, education, etc. costs vary widely people who live somewhere like SF are going to factor that in because the alternative is moving somewhere less unbalanced.
Most places I've been realize this, but a few, hint mainly sw shops, think 5 years exp suffices. And they suffer arching in pain. It hurts to watch.
Well, sometimes you do (when it's someone else's hardware, perhaps). But often, happiness is a middle ground.
Most hardware goes through phases, often planned far in advance: The expensive first version to get something out the door, then a series of cost reductions (bring many chips into a single custom chip, ditch unused features, get new vendors for subsystems) which improve profitability.
That juicer looks like it was designed to withstand a direct hit by a bunker buster. Nobody gave a damn about profit margins or ever making it cheaper, I think they just wanted to IPO or get bought.
I've also been guilty of this in my younger days, where I was very much "C++ all the things because performance." But that's kind of my point: it's immaturity at work, here.
* no one ever got hired for under-engineering
* a lot of people have died from under-engineering
* you never notice how much was engineered juuuuust right (tm). Because it was. Just. Right.
I've bought plenty of low end products from China that I'm sure were intentionally designed as cheaply as possible with no regards to quality.
Since that's what the community generally respects and focuses on, people seek out areas to add complexity – who wants to work on a boring “solved” problem? – and, especially younger engineers, often feel they have to do things the same way Google or Facebook does (it's web-scale!) even if they have 0.001% of the engineers and 0.000001% of the traffic. It's easy to miss that most people with similar problems have so much less volume that they aren't forced to do the really cool (i.e. expensive) engineering and, since they're using something stable, it's not considered interesting enough to talk about it.
One of my favorite instructors from college.
Scroll down half way to see the gif animation of the mechanism: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1793272089/juisir-juici...
It would be interesting to see if their engineering choices resulted in a much less expensive machine to manufacturer.
Indiegogo page: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/juisir-zero-cleaning-maxi...
gif direct link: https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/010/304/9b81fed3f5e8827...
It's just product differentiation. And remember, their target market are the kind of people who want to feel special by one-upping the other #rawvegan #fitspiration #healthnuts on social media.
My suspicion, if I put my engineering hat on and give them the benefit of the doubt, is it's an optimization for later.
Right now, the purchased packs you can buy are effectively already juice. Later, you may want to make them less juicy so you can spend less time manufacturing the packs, but people will scream if you make them buy a new machine. So, your first machine out the chute needs to be way overengineered.
Nevertheless, this machine design screams junior engineers.
I know nothing about Juicero, but it seems like there must be somebody who thought they were the second coming of Steve Jobs overriding both the engineers and accountants. That person's reality distortion field must have just popped rather loudly.
I'll definitely be on the lookout for other write ups from Ben Einstein. To anyone wanting more content like this, I also recommend the "Bored of Lame Tool Reviews?" (BOLTR) series of videos from YouTuber AvE:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtM5z2gkrGRuWd0JQMx76qA
What I've learned watching his channel: Don't skimp on your USB chargers, get Anker or IKEA ones (seriously, the IKEA charger was amazingly well-designed).
I have seen a lot of EEVblog videos, but only a small fraction of his output, prolific guy. I definitely agree, too much grousing at times. Though he did seem to be appropriately outraged in the first one I watched (#822, about a terrible medical tablet PC):
I think it's because he had a lot of success with his early rants, which were generally pretty on-point. As time went on they get more and more salty and inaccurate as he ran out of good ideas.
TheSignalPath is a great EE channel as well.
Thanks for that.
We would often sit down as a family and watch The Red Green Show during my middle school years. With its TV run now long over, I'm glad that there's another Canadian continuing in the grand tradition of workshop shenanigans.
If thats your flavour of comedy, I have to recommend Letterkenny. If you haven't heard of it, it's a show on CraveTV based on the part of the country I hail from.
(I know I'm digressing from the main thread... but a small sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KLSbCtinXs)
Is it as good for you as some would have you believe, no. Do some over market it as a cure all. Sure. That doesn't mean, it is bad for you*
* to an extent amount and fruit depending.
But in this system you already have the fruit and vegetables whole - because you put them into the juicer. Why spend the extra time, expense and fuss on juicing them, when you could just eat them in less time, less fuss, and without buying anything?
You've said it's better to eat them, and it's quicker, less fuss and cheaper, so why not?
If you believe the numerous health claims that vegetables in their raw state are good for you, this is a much easier way to consume them. If you don't believe it, then yeah, you could spend the time to cook it up - you're not in the target demo...
Criticisms such at TFA linked to above, speak of sweetened smoothies, mostly fruit drinks (who would buy a cold press to squeeze oranges? what a strawman). While the arguments are valid, they typically miss the main use-cases of core cold-press-juicer demo.
http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/fresh-juice-drinks-health...
I'm pretty sure that HN has consumed more of my lifespan than any diet could compensate for.
Would you say that modern fruits lack these micronutrients as well? Anecdotally, I cannot report any excessive shortages in my nutrition.
Many modern cultivated fruits don't contain nearly as much sugar as they could because they're picked early, before their prime.
In the Northwest, Rubus armeniacus is an invasive species which has never been heavily bred, and is one of the sweetest fruits you can find - especially in late summer.
Grapes are one of the only fruits which have enough sugar to make wine with unless you use chaptalization. (Though some berries like Blackberries get close.)
I agree with you about fresh squeezed OJ, but I don't believe for a second that it matters if the orange is squeezed in a press or twisted in a rotary. (different kind of juicer, but you get the point).
Over here some supermarkets have juicers pre-filled with oranges in their produce sections, you just put an empty bottle into it, push a button and you can watch live as it squeezes the oranges into your bottle.
I certainly wouldn't describe juice from concentrate as "fresh-squeezed", because it's been squeezed, boiled to reduce its water content, frozen, packed, shipped, defrosted, rehydrated and packed again before I get to drink it.
These products are not made to be functional, any functionality they have is secondary to their prime purpose: to be used as props in a ritual. What ritual they serve varies, from the mundane 'I can afford to spend a lot of money on non-essential goods' affluence signalling (most branded luxury goods fit in this category) to something resembling the Japanese tea ceremony in the sense that they turn a common event into a highly ritualised happening (I'd fit gramophone records in here). Some are just ways for unscrupulous actors to extract the maximum amount of money from an easily duped audience ($21.000 for a 3m short speaker cable [3], anyone? Don't forget to buy that $11.000 mains cable [4] while you're at it, you would not want your $144,481.80 turntable [5] to be without it).
Cold pressed juice itself is probably partly ceremonial, partly affluence signalling. Where overpriced, waste-generating Rube Goldberg juice delivery devices with vendor lock-in fit in I'll leave for you to decide.
[1] http://www.barneys.com/product/balenciaga-arena-extra-large-... [2] http://www.ikea.com/se/sv/catalog/products/17228340/ [3] http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2008/11/most-expensive-speaker-c... [4] http://www.analogueseduction.net/nordost-mains-cables/ndvali... [5] http://www.analogueseduction.net/clearaudio-turntables/clear...
It's made in Italy, from actual leather, with fabric lining, a zip pocket and keyring lanyard.
That's a lot of features that are all way nicer than what FRAKTA brings, of course. It's obviously still a luxury product, but leather isn't cheap like polypropylene.
I wonder if I can make something like this work as a sideline? I mean it's snake oil, it just has to look fancy and have a story around it, and hell, that can't be too hard.
I once got a chance to look closely at the mechanism of SF's JCDecaux overpriced automatic street toilets in SF. Those cost about $150K each. The mechanism is all Telemecanique industrial control components. If you built a washing machine that way, which you could, it would cost $5000-$10000.
Compare the Portland Loo.[1]
Either it was intentional, or somebody didn't realize that you could do things much cheaper by pinching between rollers and applying a more limited force over a longer time. I would think the result is pretty much the same.
So if it costs you $5-10k to build a washing machine with such components, that's not really a bad deal, because how much does it cost to engineer a modern washing machine? A lot more than that.
For these street toilets, the question is: how many toilets are there? If it isn't a large enough amount, the engineering cost to develop something with a lower per-unit cost won't be worth it.
Also, I don't believe "330V 15A" for a second. Maybe 2A...
Just do the math. You get about 13a tops on a 115v plug before any household circuit will trip. That is over twice that. Same with those '5hp' power tools.
Though the most telling is that the only isolated supply is the 5V Meanwell, the whole bottom half is at line potential as evidenced by the lack of transformers and the optoisolators right below the Meanwell supply (for controlling the H-bridge below).
One thing that still seems to be missing is active PFC - it was implied by the article, but I don't see enough components for it. Maybe it's just a rectifier into 170V/330V, and the in the case of 330V they drive the motor at half the duty cycle.
One other question was "why not a series-wound motor?" It was pointed out to me that one potential reason is that a series-wound motor introduces 60/120hz hum and vibrations, and maybe they found the noise objectionable.
I would quibble about the custom power supply though, they are not as difficult as they were in the past. Much of the 'magic' of building good SMPS supplies has been encapsulated into very clever chips and certification bodies have seen enough of them now that the checklists are pretty straight forward.
I don't get the outrage though.
I'm. It sure it's outrage (for most) so much as a massive internet-wide SMH after Bloomberg reported that the $700 machine (now dropped in price) does nothing your bare hands can't do: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-v...
That's not a juicer. That's an inefficient, over-engineered sieve.
Also, as overwrought and unnecessary as the Juicero product is, I can't agree with the "it's useless because you can do it by hand" argument. I could probably hand wash my clothes as well as the washing machine does in the same amount of time, but it's hardly useless. While the Juicero is pressing your juice you can be making your lunch or something.
Who knows why the CEO's response skipped straight past "having the machine do it saves you time" to "it can automatically lock you out if your pack expired."
I don't care about a more efficient bag squeezing method, that there's a bag at all is a bizarre and useless distinction.
No. It takes you about five minutes to load and unload the washing machine, try to do the washing yourself in the same amount of time.
> While the Juicero is pressing your juice you can be making your lunch or something.
In 120 seconds?
If you remove all of that crap, you get an overengineered juice-press that never says no, and always presses the packet you put into it.
Nothing is more infuriating than machines that randomly say no and refuse to do the thing they're supposed to do. The consumer value of all of that crap is negative.
"But the machine can alert you if the juice pack expired or was recalled"
Look, if you can't read the best-before date already printed on the pack, and if you can't smell the juice and tell if it's funky or not, you are a useless human being. I'm sorry, but you are.
The recall thing is so ridiculous though. The CEOs letter mentioned a hypothetical "spinach recall" that you would want to know about. Never in my life have I had to worry about my vegetables getting recalled. Why on Earth would I be looking to buy a product that can tell me about something that in my experience never happens?
Why would anyone want that in their lives?
Last ones were for packaged spinach.
I agree that it's the $400 + juice packs + nanny scans. Making smoothies isn't a big deal. And if you're willing to trade off a few $$ for a little prep effort savings there are tons of options--including ingredient subscription services.
700bucks for abag squeezer? Something went terribly wrong.
It feels like they aimed to produce some advanced robotics and built the wrong product. Could turn this into a limb for amputees, makes more sense and actually good use of the resources.
Jokingly I can even see 'the mafia' using it to crush someone's hand in the device. Though that makes me wonder if the machine does provide enough force to do that, and what kind of damage it could do... Anyone can know or figure it out?
Yep. Can get them as a subscription, each one has a QR code so that the juicer knows it is juicing an OEM pack, and is farmer GMO blah blah blah.
Which has zero value for most people.
It's far too early to tell.
Yes it is expensive but remember there are plenty of wealthy people (hint: early adopters) in this world willing to pay for convenience. If you can show me a cheaper bag squeezer that looks equally good in my kitchen and is as convenient then that would be something. But right now there isn't one.
It reminds me very much of Nutribullets or Thermomixes which were both overpriced in the beginning until competitors came in to the market.
700 bucks for an Internet of Things bag-squeezer with analytics data generated from your consumption and easy re-use of containers.
I've seen at least three or four other start-ups that could be called "Juicero for X". The interesting question is: for what sorts of products do the economics really work out? I don't want to imply everything on this template will fail, even if Juicero... can't be expected to make a healthy profit.
These subscription models, or even machines that require only a certain type of consumable, are effectively leases. Sure you may buy a piece of hardware, but it is only useful for as long as you buy and use the required consumable.
I am comfortable in renting a place to live - especially since I have moved about every 2-3 years in recent memory - and I am comfortable paying a subscription fee for some software and services. But I am not that comfortable when I have to subscribe to food or clothing for example.
Excuse the vitriol, but it absolutely makes my blood boil, the fucking Keurigs, these idiot juicers, Blue Apron, and that one company that even delivers a box of clothes each month? WTF?! I buy clothes every two years, and even I could do better.
Also, even if they offered to collect the packaging, and recycle/reuse it, it's a needless complication to an issue that shouldn't exist to begin with.
Why isn't a low-tech, low-carbon footprint life celebrated more? A french press/moka pot coffee, a mixer to make your juice (because, you know, you take the time to peel the motherfucking fruit beforehand), and cooking your own god damned food on a frying pan.
Reading your comment was deliciously cathartic, and now I know that moka pots are a thing. If I get a coffee habit again I'll have to look into trying one.
Remember CueCat? (Actually I was a young kid back then, but I'd really like to have one. I like cats.)
If you are serious about juicing you can find cheaper products that don't require packets. This is a convenience item for people with a lot of money. There is no way this company will be worth $120MM unless they design a low cost model.
You do have to clean up a mess, but if your time is that valuable you can hire a maid to do it for about that $5-$8 price point of the packs.
- two motors, one of them exceptionally strong - a durable drive train - a control board with flash memory, wifi, a camera and a USB plug for flashing without additional tools(!) - a durable aluminum frame
Those parts look like they could be building blocks for some interesting hobby projects. Did they ever think about selling to makers?
But at the same time, it feels like they have achieved such a great quality that the learning and experience to design and execute could be very valuable as an unintended consequence.
So, maybe quality always wins in the long run nevertheless. Wouldn't you hire these guys and pay a premium, if you wanted to manufacture great hardware?
Well, according to another source* one investor said that he expected the machine to be a lot smaller and that it would mush large chunks of fruit and veg. When the startup demoed at early stage, there wasn't even a working prototype - which is fine but I think it's fair to say that there was a bit of misleading. Only way to justify how it managed to raise $120 million...
*https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-v...
What if the package was a cube (16 square inches for ex. with 4 inch height) This would roughly fit in the average human palm. Wouldn't we be able to easily more or less apply equal pressure on the packaging? Just a thought.
I would consider buying these cube packs.
>No prep. No mess. No clean up.
That's brilliant because people don't like cleaning. Cleaning regular juicers is annoying to the point that only few people use them regularly. There are enough people with money to spare that this can become a success. I haven't seen it mentioned, so let me spell it out: This is Nespresso for fruits.
In fact, the nanny-scans of the QR-codes that make the machine occasionally go "NO" is of negative value to the consumer.
Imagine buying a bottle of fresh juice, and on the third day you can't open the bottle any longer because it's past the expiry date. And imagine paying $400 for the "privilege" of this. Complete WTF.
[1] https://blog.bolt.io/keurig-accidentally-created-the-perfect...
A commercial cold press countertop juicer is usually a few thousand dollars. A consumer model is ~$3-400. Cold press juicers are supposed to retain nutrients a bit more, and produce more flavorful juice. (who knows if that is true)
The Juicero is the pro-sumer k-cup version of a juicer. It's not aimed at people who are price conscious at all. Price conscious people could get something close-enough for sub $30. My guess is that the $700 juicer was designed to get a high-end reputation, with lower-end follow on products once they established the brand.
At this point, they are ruined. It's collective common sense that this is a bad deal and the value of the brand is diminished dramatically.
Their engineering decisions are questionable. If you are going for a high-end high quality unique product that will push people to spend double what the competitive product provides, it should be more appealing to look at. It's like they tried as hard as they could to make a cube-shaped plastic lined product as expensive as possible to manufacture. I'm all for sturdy commercial quality components, but not in something that looks like it was manufactured by nintendo.
The Bloomberg article was in poor form. At least let a company get out of the gate and establish itself before tearing them apart. But that's the danger involved with investing big money in companies based on a business plan and not vetting that they are good decision makers. This all could have been avoided if their PR people were on top of things. You'd think they'd have top notch PR people in place for this market segment... another bad decision.
Was the NYT article on Uber and Unroll.me poor form? Should Unroll.me get some runway to test this revenue model before the NYT includes them in a story?
Why don't we just require that businesses provide some sort of actual value? If they're producing value, they can prove it, and the product will succeed or fail on the market. But being able to get the same amount of juice by squeezing the bag isn't some "fake news" drive for clicks. It's an actual issue, which Juicero was apparently shocked by, and they should have to defend themselves.
I can squeeze a honeydew by hand and get plenty of juice. Pomegranate not so much. Kale, not at all. Celery? Maybe a little, but a few drips compared to what a juice press would give me is not at all in the same ball park. Do any of the juice packs contain hard to squeeze fruits or vegetables? The exercise is left to the reader, who can't do their own research without a $750 spend. Poor form.
> Was the NYT article on Uber and Unroll.me poor form?
I don't know which Uber article that you are referring to, but Uber is in the midst of a sea of bad press and is plenty flush to buy the help of a quality PR firm to see them through it.
Unroll.me - if you go after them, you should talk about how Mozilla uses data along with chrome, facebook, the television networks, netflix, etc. It's lazy to villify a single firm when there's an industry full of questionable practices.
> Why don't we just require that businesses provide some sort of actual value? If they're producing value, they can prove it, and the product will succeed or fail on the market
Not every product produces value. In the world of IT, software in general, and most certainly "cloud services", value should absolutely be questioned more. But it's certainly hard to be a consumer watchdog while at the same time doing the same thing. Especially when your biggest source of revenue is a series of other companies doing the same thing.
> But being able to get the same amount of juice by squeezing the bag isn't some "fake news" drive for clicks.
Are you sure about that? The video looks to me like it was created with the intent of going viral.
If you have $120M in venture funding, somebody should have stopped and asked the questions - how do we protect the brand? And what are the dangers to this brand?
That's a pretty enormous miss.
> The two primary exterior plastic parts are huge, detailed injection molded parts with multiple slides and actions, large changes in wall thickness (which makes it very hard to mold without imperfections)
Does anyone know why large changes in wall thickness makes molding these parts more difficult?
But this thing doesn't appear “generally useful” based on what I've seen about this story. It seems to want to lock you into using food from a particular vendor.
How much less appealing would my stand mixer have been as a purchase if it were outfitted with a QR reader looking to make sure that the KitchenAid™ cookie dough I was giving it was fresh? That would be a deal breaker.
Forgot what you think of the product and whether it's excessive.
I mean with that handy USB connector to flash the firmware, a $400 appliance that does one thing well is not that bad if you can do that one thing on whatever you want.
Yes, people buy those things. Will people buy this thing? Probably not. And they took a whack of VC to build it.
People are outraged because it doesn't actually accomplish any task. A number of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ comments seem to miss that this doesn't actually make juice. You're paying for them to hide 8 oz of juice in $8 packets and then again to extract the juice with this contraption (assuming your internet is working). I suppose there's some entertainment value in "juice press theatre" but you could say the same thing about a gadget that lights your money on fire.
The Juicero is roundly mocked because, despite the cost, it is worse than a regular juicer in a whole lot of ways, and only better in a very few ones.
To use your examples, it's mocked much in the same way an expensive restaurant is mocked when it offers crappy food under a veneer of pointless luxury.
--Orson Welles
- Igor Stravinsky
I'm not a customer, but I've been thinking of trying it. Honest question.
That said, the idea of getting a single ounce bottle of something any reasonable kitchen should already have (like vinegar) does feel pretty gross.
Don't people poach eggs? You need vinegar for that. Boil a pot of water, two capfuls of vinegar, crack 2 eggs into something like a 3/4 cup measure, turn heat off wait for water to stop aggressively boiling, lower the measuring cup of eggs so it partly submerges, tip it to empty the contents (you don't want to drop the eggs in from altitude), lid on the pot, set a timer for 5 or 6 minutes. Play around with the time. It'll take less time if you have a stove with residual heat: glass or coils. It'll take more time if you have gas or induction.
If you do it a bunch of times, you can figure out when they're done the way you like them just be jiggling the pot and seeing how the eggs move under water.
The fresher the egg the more it will hold together. If it flattens out on the bottom, oh well some eggs do that even with vinegar. You'll get over it.
Next start making homemade bread for your eggs. And now you'll be willing to pay $6 for really good eggs from chickens that eat insects. OK I'm carried away now...
* 1 big box
* 1 "bubblewrap" cooler bag
* 2 huge ice packs
* Misc. plastic bags for produce
* 3 small paper bags for "extras"
But I also just flat-out don't like going to the grocery store, mainly because the one near me is so busy. It's great if I go at 11PM on a weeknight, but I'm usually too sleepy to do that. It's complete chaos on a Saturday or Sunday (and go too late on a Sunday and the produce section will be emptied out too).
Thank you,
Hadi Founder, PeachDish - also use coupon code HADI
There's really no need to spend 4-7 hours a week prepping food if all you want is a decent and healthy dinner - though spending time preparing something fancy for friends and family is a rewarding activity in it's own right, but that's an entirely different matter.
I do agree that the vinegar and a stuff like that is a waste. I would rather get a large bottle
If you already have access to a kitchen, a decent set of cooking equipment (which you need regardless of whether you go for Blue Apron or not) is only a few hundred bucks, and the "basics" (pasta, rice, potatoes, onions, garlic, spices, veggie oil, olive oil, vinegar, flour, sugar, salt) are maybe 50 bucks more. Then, for less than a months' worth of meals from Blue Apron, you're set to start cooking for life.
My fiancee and I spend a grand total of 100 bucks a week, give or take, on groceries. This is in southern California, and usually including a cheap bottle of wine. We could spend even less if we wanted, but we're cooking some gourmet shit at home and constantly have leftovers, while generating 1/2 the trash of any of our neighbors thanks both to reusable containers for everything and composting. You can do SO MUCH better than Blue Apron, both in health and in environmental impact.
The same thing applies to Juicero: If I really want to start making fruit juice, I'll buy myself a decent juicer and get fresh, local fruit because it will always be cheaper than whatever they're sending out in their little pouches. I'd rather spend a couple hundred bucks on a quality machine (or better, just make smoothies since they're better for you and use the money I saved not buying a Juicero to buy a Vitamix) than buy into some cult hype bullshit.
That said, the one point I agree with you on is Blue Apron's generation of trash. It's wildly wasteful in that sense because so many of their ingredients are individually wrapped and packaged.
I do my best to cook traditional Northern Spanish food for myself (well, as close as I can given the available ingredients). There's very little food waste, precisely because so many recipes either use long lived ingredients, or just reuse them. Some are built using another dish's leftovers as an ingredient. This makes it very easy to just have an idea of the stock we need for certain kinds of ingredients, and make a high percentage of the shopping list just an exercise of comparing what we have with our ideal stock.
This only works, however, because we aren't really looking at dishes individually, and we cook almost every meal. Someone that cooks once a week, and isn't thinking about efficiency, in either ingredients or time spent preparing, will end up spending a whole lot more and eat less. Unfortunately, there's no money in teaching people how to understand a kitchen like this, and how to add recipes that will both add variety while minimizing waste.
Old standbys: One jar tomato sauce, one pound ground turkey, some peas, cook it all together and pour over pasta. One large yellow onion, bit more than a pound of chicken, three or four bell peppers, stir-fry and serve on rice.
Each of those makes about half a week of meals (not counting breakfast) using exact multiples of the unit size of the ingredients in the grocery store, so nothing gets a chance to go bad.
I too would be quite interested in how to design a recipe structure for less waste without that sort of restriction, though.
I also think getting ingredients at your doorstep from some VC backed startup with YouTube recipes on how to cook them is one of the most privileged things you can do, but at least people are cooking. Anything to get more americans cooking is a good thing, in the grand scheme of things.
I'm sure with a bit of culinary expertise and experience I could probably do it all on my own, but I don't have that experience, and I don't really have the time to acquire it, but I sure don't want to order out every night.
I haven't tried it, but Blue Apron sounds pretty great to me. I can cook but I don't need to worry about having no real idea what I'm doing? Good deal. That is way more approachable than doing a bunch of independent learning.
That being said now that I don't get free food from work, I'll be buying groceries and cooking often enough to use the larger portions.
"You don't have to think or plan anything."
And that is where your one paragraph about how easy it is to cook for yourself falls down. You have to think up a menu. You have to find a menu (and hope it is good), plan, get ingredients, get the right odds and ends and figure out portions.
That is all fairly easy to do (and I do it myself), but not cost-free. If you have more money than emotional energy and time, the Blue Apron value proposition may appeal to you.
I hate the amount of waste it produces too, but "waste for wastes' sake" is not what is going on there.
Yeah, and you lose a lot of what makes cooking cooking.
You put effort into something, your satisfaction goes up. Extend this to how you live your life, and learn the secrets of being happy.
Some people really enjoy the meal planning part. Some people really enjoy picking out fruits and vegetables at the store. But others don't like planning out meals for the whole week and find grocery store trips stressful and frustrating (maybe their local store is incredibly busy). Blue Apron has a value proposition for those in the latter category who also enjoy the part of cooking that starts once you've got the grocery bags in your kitchen.
Where one draws the line at doing it all on your own depends on time available, motivation, and opportunity cost. I'm not going to judge people whose utility function is different than mine.
I enjoy menu planning, shopping, and cooking more than most people.
OTOH, I also enjoy ballroom dancing, and a variety of other non-cooking hobbies. Sometimes, I want to devote lots of time to cooking. Sometime, I want good food at home with the care I (or my wife) puts into cooking without the rest of the organizational and planning overhead. Blue Apron excels at the latter case. It's more packaging than I'd prefer, and than I need for the use case because I have a pantry well stocked with basic essentials (which is where the worst of Blue Apron's packaging excess tends to be), but for something that works in a diverse market and without gotchas, I see why they do it.
What am I supposed to do with 90% of the smallest bunch of scallions the supermarket will sell me after I use the 10% the recipe calls for? I know, I know, I'm supposed to have 5 other recipes that I either know or can invent at the drop of a hat that just happen to use all the same ingredients. But how realistic is that for those of us that aren't amateur chefs and don't really want to become one?
It's different because making fresh juice is more time and labor intensive than "just buying a juicer" (try it... I did). Want bananas in your orange juice like Dole sells? Now you need to combine that juicer with a blender, etc. Peeling a bunch of oranges by hand takes time. Making fresh juice by hand is completely not worth it.
If you ignore time costs, sure; pre-measured ingredients in the quantity necessary for the recipe provided is a huge time saver.
Yes, it creates waste, but it's not without utility.
Instead I use a service called plantoeat which lets me import my own recipes and optimize my grocery store runs. Once you get a good rotation going it helps with the problem of over buying certain ingredients.
We still eat almost all of our meals at home, with or without Blue Apron, but it substantially improved the quality of the average meal.
The problem with Blue Apron is that they made meals complicated for the sake of being complicated. Way too many sauces to make, things to reduce, things to mix, etc. Every meal took at least 2x what they claimed it would take, and it seemed to take tons of dishes just because of how needlessly complex they made them.
We're using Gobble now, which is billed more as 15min meals and usually only dirty a couple of dishes. I vastly prefer it.
I don't like the trash aspect of it, I'll give you that.
When I was doing a MSc in environmental engineering we were careful to let the stakeholders decide what environmental problems are important based on their feelings and not try to prioritize ourselves. Part of it is practical, it's very hard to have stakeholder buy-in on problems they don't care about, but part of it is that I don't think there is consensus on how to do comparisons across problems. You have to make difficult value judgments. (How many kgs of CO2 is one beautiful pristine forest worth? etc.)
Some keywords you could look into are multi-criterion decision analysis and ecosystem services.
My intuition and back-of-the-envelope estimates say that household waste, recycling, and water use don't matter that much.
I'm not too popular with the environmental committee at work because I like to remind them that their annoying, time-consuming eco-friendly intervention of the week matters an order of magnitude less than switching a single meal per week from beef to a veggie alternative.
I think the big questions are: how big is your house? what type of energy do you use for heating/AC? how much do you drive/fly? do you eat animal products?
For most people the rest is comparatively not super consequential. (With some exceptions of course, there are hobbies that are 100x worse than others. People around here drive snowmobiles with 2-stroke engines, they are much less regulated and produce horrendous pollution compared to cars.)
Obviously it's not ideal, but it should be compared to current behavior, not ideal behavior.
Can we tell how much food waste Blue Apron is saving? I remember reading that they're extremely picky about what they're willing to ship out and end up wasting quite a bit to send out "perfect" ingredients.
We started using them a month or so ago and its been pretty good.
Disclaimer: My Fiance works with the husband of someone who works there. (Not sure if that is a real conflict of interest or not)
Imho even recycling is mostly useless. The return, both environmental and economic, on everything but metal recycling is abysmal. Most plastic and paper processes are lucky to break even, with a few exceptions (hdpe comes to mind).
Sorry, but I can't really agree with that line of thinking because it's basically throwing any and all personal responsibility out of the window.
While pushing for better/smarter regulation is an important part of the whole process, it's only one part of the whole process that involves many different parts.
On an individual basis recycling might only add up to a rounding error but the same could be said about many improvements in energy efficiency, the point here being that many of these rounding errors add up to a bigger actual impact.
If everybody thinks recycling is a waste of time and they should instead just lobby for carbon tax, then barely anybody will be more conscious about their waste production and how to prevent more needless waste from being produced, which is just as much of an actual issue (if not even more) as farm subsidies or carbon production.
It's estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastics swimming in the ocean than actual fish, we are on a steady course of turning this planet into a massive garbage dump.
A huge percentage of it is a waste of time. It is a small positive for paper and aluminum. If this doesn't make people feel like they are doing their part, this adds up to a tiny benefit. However, it probably does make people feel like they are doing more then they actually are. The net effect could easily be negative. For many other things, recycling has no effect or a small negative effect on carbon. This does not add up to a bigger actual impact. It is only negative.
> if everybody thinks recycling is a waste of time and they should instead just lobby for carbon tax, then barely anybody will be more conscious about their waste production and how to prevent more needless waste from being produced, which is just as much of an actual issue (if not even more) as farm subsidies or carbon production.
I am saying this would be a good thing. People are way too conscious about their recycling when it has almost zero impact. Doing literally almost anything else, has a bigger impact in most cases.
> how to prevent more needless waste from being produced, which is just as much of an actual issue (if not even more) as farm subsidies or carbon production.
I don't know how you decide is needless waste but a carbon tax will cause everyone decide what they need vs don't need. Regardless, there is no chance that needless waste is as much of an issue as farm subsidies or global warming.
I love cooking. I cook six meals a week, the seventh is take-out or off the grid or something. Three of those six meals I cook a week are sunbasket, and those are weeknight meals where I don't have to go to the store ahead of time. I don't stress the meal plans, which means I can actually cook dinner and eat at a sane hour (say, 7pm) without having to leave work early or stress about starting cooking as soon as I'm able.
I also regularly alter recipes I get, as part of the "I love cooking" bit - I add ingredients, rearrange stuff, change out the process to make it easier / simpler / better. I'm able to express myself, cooking-wise, even though the recipe is mostly fixed. Price-wise, I end up spending about $10 per person per meal. That's around 140% of my average per person per meal cost when I just shop on my own (although there's an externality here: i get more actual meals when I shop for myself, because I usually cook for at least one lunch worth of leftovers when I shop, so up the price a bit more).
Personally? I'd be happy with a box of food where things weren't pre-measured and stuff (every N weeks they send you a new bottle of coconut vinegar or whatever), cutting down on the single-serving bags that hold a single clove of garlic or whatever. I'd also be happy with someone just shopping on my behalf, but these boxes are a real bargain compared to instacart prices, so there's that.
This clearly means to anyone with technical insight that what is inside the bag is not really sealed raw vegetables in a plastic bag able to handle 10,000 lbs/sq in of pressure, but is some sort of processed vegetable juice that has been artificially processed and embedded within some sort of substrate meant to appear solid-ish.
An actual vegetable press that uses immense pressure does indeed produce a particular special kind of "pressed" raw juice extract that retains the vitamins and flavor. However this machine clearly does not do that and is therefore misrepresenting itself. The evidence that proves it is that people can squeeze whatever is inside it out.
If the inventors and investors of this technology wish to claim otherwise I am more than willing to engage in a personal challenge where we get together and look inside the bag and find out if it is really unprocessed raw vegetables or not.
Disagree? Buy a carrot. Squeeze it as hard as you can. Film the result and upload it to youtube. Do the same for a beet, for lettuce, and for celery. Post the link. Demonstrate that pressed vegetable juice from raw unprocessed vegetable is possible with simple force from the human hand, unleveraged.
I think it's time you took some scissors or an Xacto knife, whatever's required, and cut open the bag to see what's in there. I know I'd be very interested in that result.
This is part of their disposal process. You're supposed to cut the bag and empty it into your green bin, etc.
The centrifuge approach works surprisingly well, the pulp that comes out of a good one is quite dry, all the juice is gone. It yields a lot more juice out of a carrot than you'd expect.
This "press" simply does the last step in juicing. The hard work of shredding is already done.
I can't see so clearly the value for the customer. Finely chopped fruit, even if convenient, should be cheaper than entire fruit. In fruits being entire, clean, firm, and as close as possible to the thing hanging in the tree is a sign of extra quality. Each time you cut a fruit its market value diminishes.