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.

Comments

it was a scam

[nimbius]

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?...

Re:it was a scam

[amicusNYCL]

I don't think it was a scam per se, the people running the company are just idiots. Selling bags of pre-crushed fruit and vegetable juice is great if they can do it efficiently and cheaply, there was no reason to tack on some $400 machine to remove the juice from the bag. Or, make the machine a $20 add-on to buying the juice if you really want a machine to do it for you, it really doesn't need to be a complex machine and there's certainly no reason to restrict it to only work with a single brand of bag, that makes it less useful. They shot themselves in the foot by making the machine their primary product instead of the juice. It's just short-sightedness, they didn't even realize what their product was.

Re:it was a scam

[JohnFen]

Honestly, the machine they made was a case study in how not to design a consumer machine. It was seriously over-engineered and therefore overpriced all by itself.

Re:it was a scam

[Opportunist]

You can't squeeze blood from a stone, and you can't squeeze juice from a lemon that has already been completely squeezed dry.

Force does of course come into the equation ... to a point. Once all the fruit's cells have been squished and drained of all fluid, no amount of force will yield any more. And that happens way, way before you apply 2 tons of force.

Besides, raw squeezing power isn't the best way to harvest juice from a fruit. The best way actually depends highly on the fruit. Some you have to squeeze, some you have to shred and squeeze the shreds, with others again it's best to shock-freeze them and then "beat" them... simply applying pressure isn't exactly the best way to get juice from (most) fruits.

Re:it was a scam

[whoever57]

I don't think it was a scam per se, the people running the company are just idiots.

I imagine that they thought they could be the juice version of Keurig.

Fun Fact: Juice isn't good for you

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Re:Fun Fact: Juice isn't good for you

[Luthair]

So you think that celery is a fruit?

Re:Fun Fact: Juice isn't good for you

[WillAffleckUW]

So you think that celery is a fruit?

I think we found a Juicero investor!

Re: Fun Fact: Juice isn't good for you

[ShanghaiBill]

[citation needed]

Citation: Fruit Juice Intake Predicts Increased Adiposity Gain in Children

Citation: Reducing childhood obesity by eliminating 100% fruit juice

Citation: Fruit consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes

Citation: Intake of Fruit, Vegetables, and Fruit Juices and Risk of Diabetes in Women

Citation: Soft drink and juice consumption and risk of physician-diagnosed incident type 2 diabetes

Re:Fun Fact: Juice isn't good for you

[pjt33]

If you think that's bad, I've heard of a product called American cheese...

Re: Fun Fact: Juice isn't good for you

[Aighearach]

Odd list of citations, since 3 of them are re-tellings of the same study which contradicts other past studies in some regards, 1 of them isn't even a study it is just a link about promoting a message of reduced fruit juice consumption, and the other is a study that says if you give fat kids fruit juice they get fatter, and if you give them whole fruit they lose weight. That actually just tells you that those kids are eating too many total calories and the fruit juice had a lot of calories; the rest of their diet was unchanged, after all. It tells you nothing about what happens if you eat the same amount of calories, but some of them were from fruit juice vs something else.

You make it sound like you found 5 studies, but you found 1 study and it relies on self-reporting and it says in the conclusions that participants might have reported fruit "punch" as fruit juice. Regionally in the US "fruit juice" is actually the colloquial name for it even when it is only 5% juice. It was a pretty good study, but other people recalculating the results to generate additional charts is not the same thing as having additional studies that verify the results.

Re: $55k

[__aaclcg7560]

Umm, creimer, is that you?

I'm neither APK nor 110010001000. I'm honored to be the third most recognized name on Slashdot.

Where's your Amazon referral link?

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: How People Make Orange Juice

What did you expect?

[burtosis]

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.

Are They Dumping Them On eBay Yet?

[careysub]

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.