Juicero: The $400 Press That Was Beaten By Hands, Politely

The Juicero press launched on 31 March 2016 at $699. It was a thirty-pound aluminium countertop machine that pressed single-serving pouches of chopped fruit and vegetables, sold on subscription at five to eight dollars each. It would not press a pouch until it had scanned the QR code on the packet and checked it over wifi against a server, confirming the pack was genuine and had not expired. Founder Doug Evans announced it on Twitter as the world’s first cold-press juicing system to help you achieve true health and longevity.

The Machine Was Beautifully Built

This is the part everyone forgets, and it is the part that makes the story worth telling. Ben Einstein at Bolt took one apart in April 2017 and found genuine engineering. Eight machined aluminium components making up over half the bill of materials. A custom hardened-steel spur gearbox. A door-locking mechanism of roughly ten injection-moulded parts plus a solenoid and stamped steel. The exterior plastics went through eight separate mould revisions. Somebody cared enormously about this object.

Einstein’s verdict was that the press applied force across the whole surface of the pack at once, while a human hand applies pressure over a much smaller area, and that a redesign could have saved hundreds of dollars per unit. That is a polite way of describing an appliance built to aerospace standards for the purpose of squashing a bag of kale.

The Squeeze

On 19 April 2017, Ellen Huet and Olivia Zaleski at Bloomberg published the story that ended the company. Two Juicero investors had worked out that the packs could simply be wrung out by hand. Bloomberg tested it themselves.

Here are the actual numbers, because they matter and almost every retelling gets them wrong. Hands produced 7.5 ounces of juice in about ninety seconds. The $400 machine produced 8 ounces in about two minutes. The press won on yield by half an ounce and lost on speed by thirty seconds.

The machine was never useless. It was redundant, which is funnier and considerably harder to defend.

The Defence

Chief executive Jeff Dunn, formerly president of Coca-Cola North America, posted a response. His three arguments for the machine were the first closed loop food safety system allowing packs to be remotely disabled during a recall, consistent pressing calibrated by flavour, and connected data to manage a tight supply chain because the product is live raw produce.

Every one of those is a real benefit. Every one of them is also an answer to a question about industrial logistics, delivered to a customer asking why they cannot use their hands. Dunn added that hand-squeezed hacks produced a mediocre and possibly very messy experience, and he offered anyone who wanted one a full refund on the press. His exact words were that if you send us your Press, we’ll refund the money you paid for it. Period.

How It Ended

Fewer than 5 percent of customers took the refund. Think about that for a moment. The internet spent a week laughing at these people, and roughly 95 percent of them looked at their beautiful aluminium bag-squasher, considered the offer of their money back, and kept the machine.

The price had already been cut to $399 in January 2017. In July the company laid off about a quarter of its staff and announced a next-generation press aimed at around $200, with Dunn conceding that the current prices were not a realistic way to fulfil the mission at the scale to which we aspire. On 1 September 2017, after selling over a million produce packs, Juicero suspended sales entirely. Refunds ran on a ninety-day window. Reported funding sat somewhere around $120 million, though published totals vary between $118 million and $134 million and we have not seen a filing that settles it.

The Verdict

Juicero is remembered as the stupidest product Silicon Valley ever made, and that verdict is slightly unfair in a way that makes it better. The machine worked. It was well built, it pressed more thoroughly than a person, and its owners mostly liked it enough to decline a refund. The failure was that all of that engineering, all that funding and a wifi connection had been deployed to win an argument against hands by half an ounce. Somewhere there is a warehouse of exquisite aluminium gearboxes, and every one of them lost to a person standing over a sink.