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

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: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.

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.