Juicero, Maker of the Infamous $400 Juicer, Is Shutting Down (fortune.com)
Beth Kowitt, reporting for Fortune: Juicero has run out of juice. The San Francisco-based maker of counter-top cold-press juicers said today that it is shutting down operations and suspending the sale of its presses and produce packs immediately. The announcement on the company's website comes after the startup said in July that it was undergoing a "strategic shift" to more quickly lower the cost of its $399 juicers and $5-7 juice packs filled with raw fruits and vegetables. As part of the shift, the company said then that it would lay off about a quarter of its staff. At the time, Juicero CEO Jeff Dunn wrote in a letter to employees obtained by Fortune that the current prices were "not a realistic way for us to fulfill our mission at the scale to which we aspire." But Juicero realized it couldn't bring down the cost of its products as a standalone company. It was too small to achieve the required economies of scale on its own. The company will now focus on finding a buyer, it wrote in Friday's blog post. From an article in April: After the product hit the market, some investors were surprised to discover a much cheaper alternative: You can squeeze the Juicero bags with your bare hands.
The juicer was nothing more than a cpu and a stepper motor that wrung out a sack of pre shredded vegetables into a glass. Investors immediately called this out, which is likely why juicero isnt around anymore. Not to mention the device was only compatible with DRM juice bags pre-purchased at $40 per week.
complete hardware teardown available here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Good people go to bed earlier.
Actually, juice is highly correlated with diabetes if done to excess.
Vegetable juices are fine, but fruit juicers can lead to substantial increases in both pre-diabetes and adult onset diabetes, if not part of a varied diet.
And having robots take away the exercise of squeezing it is just making it worse. Calories need to be burned somehow.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Didn't see that one coming!
How many Juicero units did Apple buy for their headquarters? Inquiring iSheep want to know!
I earn $55k in Government IT support in Silicon Valley. $399 seems like a lot to me. I can go to Costco and get juice for $1.
The appliance was trying squeezing the juice out of customers using some bizzare combination of the pricing model of printer toner combined with a predatory monthly app subscription and a keurig. Not sure who the hell thought people would actually swallow this. At least do something novel like having the machine hold 30 different packets and custom order a drink. As it is it was an outright money grabbing scam.
We need to have a big party and use an antique wringer-washer to sqeeze the juice out into the tub full of booze. Still don't need the overpriced sqeezer tho
The folks who pitched this scam took salaries. Yeah, it was always gonna fail, but should have never been funded
We all thought Juicero would redefine the paradigm of disruption. Some people said it was as dumb as Snapchat or Bitcoin, and maybe they were right, but it's still just a tragic loss for all those visionary investors.
And nothing of value was lost.
I mean, look at the damn thing. Clearly, this was designed to piggyback on the market that Kuerig is exploiting. The difference is, the Kuerigs (or at least the older models) don't have DRM, don't require Kuerig branded cups, and can do more than coffee. I've seen tea and cocoa K-cups, because basically, the operation is the same - run hot water over contents of K-cup.
This damn thing had a much more limited run of choices, there were no outside brands you could use with it, and the stupid thing wasn't even that efficient. I mean, I'm sure people with more money than sense bought some, but given the price point and the problems it had, there was no way this thing was going to take off.
And now they're looking for a buyer? Good luck with that. I'd say that I doubt any investor is quite that stupid, but it's possible that Juicero has some patents that are worth something.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
It's not humans causing global warming. It's humans being a major contributor. I'm pretty sure that's the only one that's not pseudoscience.
I wonder, what can you turn a machine that squeezes small packages? Grape press maybe for making wine? Olive press? I know, peanut butter maker.
And rebrand it as the ijuicer for only $2995.00 plus $49.95 per juice pack.
So is it fair to say that the company investors got juiced?
https://www.crunchbase.com/org...
Burning through $150 million in funding since 2013 ($88000 per DAY including weekends), they might as well have been juicing actual money.
-Styopa
The issue with Juicero, as with so many areas where people work on something that is their passion (whether food, music, art, coffee, wine) is that they start to forget that the effort they put into it does not necessarily translate into how much other people value it, or how much people are willing to pay for it.
You get people who think that because they slaved away for hours on a painting, essay, cup of coffee or artisinal x,y,z, etc means that they can charge big $$ for it.
If that were true, history / philosophy / library science majors would be pulling in huge bucks for all the time they spent studying esoteric things that no one cares about, while people who scrape the internet for cute cat videos would be sitting in poverty.
The other thing they start to forget is that few people care about the extra details that they care about, because they've been immersed in the topic for years and lost an absolute sense of proportion, such as:
- the ability to remotely cancel juice bags on expiration
- having a squeezing mechanism that saves you 10 seconds of effort but costs $400...
Can I buy a Juicero on eBay for $50 (shipping included) yet? There are probably things I need to crush, now I'll be set. (Yeah I know I'll have to Arduino the controller.) Yes, I see people trying to recoup their losses by offering their ill-advised purchase for $180 (and up) starting bids on eBay.
But this guy has the right idea selling a "Juicero 2.0", a hand cranked roller press, which he says (no doubt truthfully) is twice as fast as a Juicero, and costs only $150.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Another pseudoscience that needs kicking out to the curb is economics.
TAM for decent fruit/veg juice probably 90% western world.
SAM for this product considering initial outlay and consumables pricing... I doubt it's 1% of all households and businesses.
"You can squeeze the Juicero bags with your bare hands."
Which makes for a very expensive $5-$7 cup of juice.
46 oz of V-8 Original is only $2.84.
One of those things has a vast amount of scientific research and evidence behind it, the others do not. Can you guess which one?
The question is, which MOFI would get a Juicero first?
The one in Sweden https://idle.slashdot.org/stor...
Or the one in Austria http://nation.com.pk/entertain... ?
Pivot pivot pivot. never fail. Squeeze it for everything it's worth.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
...and in Juicero's case, you could do that squeezing with your own hands.
The idea of a juicer is to work with fresh produce that is readily and inexpensively available. This product failed to do that. It delivered a ridiculously over-engineered solution to a problem that simply doesn't exist. The packages that were squeezed by their machine could have just been supplied pre-sqeuuzed, or could even be squeezed by hand just fine. Now I'm guessing that they will want to refund everyone who bought their expensive hardware, and will now be stuck without a supply of raw materials for this expensive product to function. The actual hardware did look very nicely built. It's just a shame that it served no useful purpose. I'm not sure that this was a scam. The level of product engineering and high build quality suggests not, although the concept is clearly very silly.
A product designer and venture capital partner took apart a Juicero to see what made the notorious $400 juice presser so expensive. What he found was eight separate machined parts and a slew of custom plastic pieces that likely made the presser more expensive than it needed to be
https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensive-6add74594e50
Every entrepreneur who is struggling to get funding for their idea and/or product cringes whenever we see stuff like this. It just goes to show you that it is often not the merit of the actual idea that attracts the funding. There are at least a thousand ideas out there that are 10x better than the one behind the Juicero; yet each of those will struggle to find even $1M in funding, let alone $120M.
I have a project that I have been working on for years now. I think it is great and has huge potential, yet because I lack the 'funding skills', I am struggling to find investors who will give it even modest sums.
The internet-enabled microprocessor on these things could do the necessary computations. The only thing they need to do, to corner the market on JuiceCoin, is to tie it to the DRM tags on juice paks. Just think of it - the machine can pay for itself - free juice for all!
1 - Invent something that needs cartridges or envelopes or bags or anything as a reason for doing useful service. 2 - Profit. 3 - Watch out for the Internet.