I think they went about getting to market wrong. They should not have targeted end consumers with their equipment.
They should have went after the convenience store market using the soda dispenser/automated latte/vending machine/icee making business model. Basically convince the store owner to have some refrigerated space dedicated to the pouches and then put the machine nearby for the customer to make their own juice in real time.
I see a Juice company in the SF Ferry Building selling fresh squeezed juice for over $8. If they could have positioned themselves somewhere between that and $2 pasteurized/packaged juice from the grocery store, they could have done very well.
Thing is, nothing about the Juicero is fresh squeezed. It's mostly masticated fruit pulp, that is squeezed out of a bag. That juice company you mentioned, is actually freshly squeezing juice. Juicero was complete nonsense from start to finish.
I believe originally they thought they might make a fresh squeeze. This story is similar to Theranos - the founders/executives just did not want to accept the reality. Juicero founders eventually gave up - and devised some crazy compromise that let them pretend that it is a fresh juice - but it was quite deceiving and it did not work well.
It's like... 70% fresh squeezed. The fruit is chopped up into smaller pieces, so for the most part there isn't much difference, and it is very new fruit. But to the target demographic 70% might as well be 0%.
The trouble is, I've always thought Juicero was a bank shot for digitized food in general. If that's the case, they needed to be serving consumers not businesses.
The concept of food that's uniquely tagged and tracked from origin to consumption is pretty attractive - makes contamination a breeze to trace back, keeps you from cooking with rotten food since the machine knows to reject it, and it could automatically track what you've got in your kitchen to suggest recipes / restock for you.
That's all been thought of before, the trouble is how on earth do you build that network? I suspect the reason Juicero got so much money is they were trying to build it first with high end luxury foods, and then expand down-market to eventually own the 'groceries of the future.'
Personally, I think good ol Jeff Bezos is going to win this one too by first owning grocery delivery straight up, and then going 'oh by the way they're all trackable if you want, you should buy Amazon brand appliances to make use of the feature :)" because as others pointed out here, counter space is at a premium and nobody really wants appliances that don't work with all their ingredients.
Anyway, that's what I tell myself to make this whole ludicrous story less sad.
> The concept of food that's uniquely tagged and tracked from origin to consumption is pretty attractive - makes contamination a breeze to trace back, keeps you from cooking with rotten food since the machine knows to reject it, and it could automatically track what you've got in your kitchen to suggest recipes / restock for you.
What makes you think people want those things? I certainly don't, and I've never heard anyone mention wanting any of those things. I have heard people mention that they hate appliances like the coffee makers that only work with the expensive patented coffee pods from their manufacturer. (And printers, etc.)
I don't want any appliance that the manufacturer can shut down or refuse to run remotely. (See the recent story about the guy who paid off his car, but it was disabled remotely because he didn't pay the "remove the disabler" fee.)
In ~35 years of cooking, I don't recall ever using ingredients that went bad. I'm sure I probably did once or twice, but it didn't leave a bad enough impression on me to even remember, let alone want this sort of device that's tethered to the network and manufacturer, with all the problems that brings.
If only we had some kind of olfactory or optical equipment stuck on the front of our faces that could help determine the rottenness or mouldiness of food.
Failing that, perhaps producers of packaged food could use some kind of common standard system to inform consumers of the date by which the food should be used by, or before which it might be at its best.
That moment when someone unironically recommends full-life-cycle logistics tracking for foodstuffs as a solution to simply checking the expiration date or examining raw ingredients before preparing...
I think the future of food is different - it's about restaurant quality meals, for cheap, large selection, with zero effort. maybe via online ordering, maybe Whole-foods/Walmart. And you may need some fancy oven like combi-oven or solid-state microwave.
And even if we're talking cuts of meat, i think technology like MATS(microwave assisted thermal sterilization) may give you high quality meat that doesn't spoil for very long, so that won't be an issue.
And as for suggesting recipes based on fridge content or restocking (are those such big problems for consumers?) - there are probably other ways to solve that , like AI + camera, no need to reshuffle the whole supply chain.
If you use a loyalty card at a Kroger owned store, they'll tell you if something is flagged for contamination, it's an automated call system. There is already pretty reasonable tracking on the industry side of the food equation; some things are better than others. It's just not at the point of consumption. I'm kind of okay with this, I'd rather the industry as a whole do more things to prevent contamination period. Making a more friendly notification is nice, it could be a phone call, and email, a notification with some app; it's pretty rare and I want it more rare, not a friendlier notification, that's just me though.
Now I think you could make that stuff better, don't get me wrong, I'm not going to hate on Juicero for that. Their entire play was just VC-Bingo though: they had a device, they had a subscription, they had "lock in" (device is only good with the subscription) they had internet attachment, it's a health and wellness type play, probably some other things I'm not thinking of. Anyone know if they had to subsidize the prices, that'd be the grand slam if they had to do that too. $30 a week for 5 packs of juice, that's $120 a month and you do the work and clean up the mess and you have to get different juice on the weekends. The bags aren't supposed to make that much mess but I think the psychology of it all is huge, a coffee maker doesn't make much mess either and you'll pay a gigantic premium at a coffee shop. How many months before you get a tip-top of the line cold press juicer that'll make juice out of any produce? With no subscription.
Interesting concept...
Tracking what you have to suggest recipes or restock - that's the feature that seems most appealing. But I don't think you need a network like you describe to accomplish that. You could have a "smart" fridge or some other device that can catalog your food for you thru imaging and scans. Hell, you could just input a list you type up yourself. Like you say, Amazon could easily do this. They already have a part of it with their dash buttons and smart home devices. They have another part now with Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh.
The other benefits you mention are marginal at best, in my opinion. I would never pay a premium for tagged and tracked food like that.
Edit: Funny, there's a post on overengineering on the front page!
A lot of my trust in Amazon eroded after the whole co-mingling fake-eclipse-glasses fiasco. If I can't trust Amazon to tell me accurately where the stuff I buy on their website is coming from… how can I trust them in the retail grocery world where there's so much more middlemen and variables in play?
What value does this add over stocking various drinks, in containers, in a refrigerated case with no machine?
I've noticed that the digital multi-flavor soda dispensers create more customer bottlenecks compared the regular 4-6 nozzle dispensers. Having every customer figure out how to load a "juice pack" then operate the machine seems like it would have a similar inconveniencing effect.
Basically those units are a great idea, but to keep costs down they only serve one at a time. If that could change to each unit even serving 2-3 the bottlenecks would ease, and you could also consider blended approach in which you have the standard 4-6 nozzle dispenser and one or two freestyles. After all some people really have no interest in anything other than straightforward Cokeor whatever else.
If you have slightly more space and $$ than an end user there are, IMO, much better options available. I see more and more in the grocery stores orange juice squeezers that make juice out of oranges in front of you. With a clear plastic front you see the machine slicing oranges and squeezing the juice for you into any container you want.
Cost-wise it is more expensive than buying not-from-concentrate juice in a half gallon quantities, but not that much more so. Definitely <= 100% premium and you get it freshly squeezed right before you.
The problem is the founders did come from that world and tried to consumerize it. If they'd focused on per-juice-cost (thus, high volume) and gone from attended to semi-attended (office) or unattended (vending machine) it might have won.
They also could have just built a "scrappier" v1.0 hardware product at a lower cost (maybe with rollers or something) at 50% BOM cost and subsidized it a bit more. At $200 + $6-8 per pack they might have been successful; at $200 + $200/mo for 30 packs they probably would have been.
Rollers were my immediate thought as to how to get the juice out. Would love one of their engineers to chime in and talk about the reasons they built it that way.
If they did the "sell to stores" biz, the competition they would have seen would be far stronger, and stores would squeeze them, unlike their current dream of a printer for juice.
And it's far from certain that first business would attract VC's.
I find this line really funny for some reason. (Juicero has been the laughingstock of the tech community over their go to market, pricing, and marketing/business models, and we are now looking at the pieces as they exploded over this fact.)
So I had to try really, really hard not to reply to your innocent comment with mock surprise - like no! You think?
Good idea but I don't think it's that easy: the extraction of olive oil is not a simple matter of pressing olives until the oil comes out, but a long process with multiple steps [1] that I doubt they could been done by a press that is relatively simple as/as big as Juicero (as it can be seen by the cons in the two methods for the extraction that are listed on wiki).
Juicero did nothing inherently wrong. It is a fancy juice machine for fancy offices and busy people. It's really just another random victim of the internet lynch mob.
AvE tore one of their machines down awhile back[0]. It's so over engineered, I was wondering how they'd ever make money back with their business model.
> This is what you get with no constraints. Building something that lasts and doesn't break the bank is what's hard. This thing will last forever, but it's a machine to squeeze pre-masticated fruit in a plastic bag that costs $400.
I've watched this before and just skipped through to find that bit, but I'm fairly certain he also mentions at one point how they're almost certainly selling the juicer itself at a loss, which makes the whole thing that much more absurd.
I love how Bolt.io tore down a pair of Beats headphones and came to the opposite conclusion -- that they were a ripoff and that the components inside in no way justified the pricetag.
But, take a look at the quality of the internals of Juicero vs. Beats headphones and realize that one of the companies is worth $1.5B while the other is shutting down.
Holy crap. That's the kind of thing I expect from undergrads who don't know what COTS stands for.
Like how do you convince yourself that this is a sane design for something more than a prototype? Using more off the shelf stuff might result a little more weight and a higher overall part count but the cost savings would be huge.
As I kept watching the video I thought the word "overengineered" was the completely wrong word, and AvE himself addresses it perfectly in the end: It's "underengineered", "underdesigned" but "overbuilt".
I always assumed that the revenue was going to come from selling the bags of fruit. The machine is easily and cheaply cloned, but a network for distributing prepackaged produce would be much harder to copy and provide the recurring revenue that really matters.
I've wondered if some of the problem here is how many people involved are so well off, the VCs especially, that they've forgotten what $40/week is to the vast bulk of people in the world, or even in the industrialized countries. That's on the order of 5% of the median total income and a great deal more than 5% of the median disposable income in the US. I wonder how many people just forgot how expensive that is and how small the market is for that level of extravagance.
After watching their promo video at the top of the page, I'm left wondering two things:
- If the machine takes away all my liberty (I cannot use it on my fruit and vegetables) and even their packs need to be refrigerated and stay good only for 8 days, can't I just buy the resulting juice and put it in my fridge? (If I left the bottle closed, that would last equally long). So what do I gain?
- They're using QR codes to check that I'm not using their packs beyond the "best by" date or try to trick the machine into squeezing a competitor's cheaper packs. And for that, they need a camera on the inside. And WiFi. Didn't somebody at some point notice that the way they're treating their customers is really disrespectful? This is the whole printer-cartridge-thing all over again.
You gain the prestige of saying "you want a fresh-squeezed juice?" to your guests. Keurig grew HUGE in large part thanks to the appearance of higher class it brought to ordinary homes and offices. Instead of fooling with tools, you click a button on a sleek looking SV futuremachine, and presto.
Humans are weird, and this is a very good marketing strategy.
I'm not familiar with Keurig, but I assume it is similar to Nespresso?
Nespresso became extremely popular because:
1) The machines are very cheap (compared to other espresso makers)
2) They take a fraction of the time to prepare coffee (compared to other methods)
3) They are extremely easy to clean
4) Capsules have a long shelf life, you can get them in small quantities, so it doesn't matter if you drink 3 cups of coffee per day or 3 cups of coffee per month.
5) They have really fancy stores in top locations where they sell their capsules
Everything about Nespresso is convenient and feels great. There is no DRM, because that would not be convenient.
The only thing that's convenient about the Juicero machine is that it is easy to clean. Everything else about it, from the short shelf live to the subscription pricing, to the long time it takes to make juice, is just inconvenient. The DRM and Wifi requirement is just stupid.
I have a Nespresso machine and highly disagree with you. The worst part of preparing Coffee is cleaning and the time required when I just want the coffee and not to mess with tools.
With the Nespresso, I just put the capsule and I get my coffee. The cleaning is easy and I don't need to clean stuff for every coffee.
Sure, you might do a whole bottle of coffee and consume it during the day. But the machine gives you convenience and it is affordable.
I have no problem putting 200-300USD on a coffee machine.
For juice? Well, I like it fresh. I didn't try Juicero but I highly doubt that it compares to freshly squeezed oranges.
Except that Keurig/Nesspresso/Tassimo machines actually make coffee using ground beans. It's a convenience thing, sure, but they are roughly the same as an espresso machine that you don't have to fill up yourself. Juicero was squeezing juice out of a pack. It could come in a bottle and you could pour it yourself, the product would be exactly identical.
Even if the machine was $50, I don't think many people would want to spend that much for the privilege of being locked in to Juicero proprietary juice packs, letalone spend kitchen counter space to a dedicated juice squeezer machine. And everyone who did now has an exquisitely engineered $700 paperweight.
Ultra expensive juicers aren't new[1]. Even "normal" juicers are quite expensive[2]. Juicero was just trying to jump on a fairly well-established gravy train catering to the juice woo crowd.
Has there ever been a juicer before this that has forced you to buy all your fruits from one company? I think that's the key. People are ready to pay big bucks for premium appliances, but lock-in is another matter.
Apparently as per the article they're at least offering refunds to some subset of their customers.
Also, I think at $50 a lot more people would consider it. Keurig coffee makers seem to have done pretty well and I'm sure the $100 cost was a big part of that (as opposed to charging say > $200).
Never claimed otherwise, just unfortunate or perhaps obtuse timing. People around here sure wouldn't dare miss the Burn, even as their company burned out.
They have probably been preparing for this for many months now and now that it's over, I think the founder deserves some time to relax and reflect. I only hope the employees get good severance packages.
The Bloomberg article described Juicero as "one of the most lavishly funded gadget startups in Silicon Valley" and founder Doug Evans once said he planned to do for juicing what Steve Jobs did for computers.
With vision like that, it's hard to believe there were any issues.
Readit News
They should have went after the convenience store market using the soda dispenser/automated latte/vending machine/icee making business model. Basically convince the store owner to have some refrigerated space dedicated to the pouches and then put the machine nearby for the customer to make their own juice in real time.
I see a Juice company in the SF Ferry Building selling fresh squeezed juice for over $8. If they could have positioned themselves somewhere between that and $2 pasteurized/packaged juice from the grocery store, they could have done very well.
https://www.yelp.com/biz/sow-juice-san-francisco
https://medium.com/@zby/the-juicero-story-2f4f762f7e60
The concept of food that's uniquely tagged and tracked from origin to consumption is pretty attractive - makes contamination a breeze to trace back, keeps you from cooking with rotten food since the machine knows to reject it, and it could automatically track what you've got in your kitchen to suggest recipes / restock for you.
That's all been thought of before, the trouble is how on earth do you build that network? I suspect the reason Juicero got so much money is they were trying to build it first with high end luxury foods, and then expand down-market to eventually own the 'groceries of the future.'
Personally, I think good ol Jeff Bezos is going to win this one too by first owning grocery delivery straight up, and then going 'oh by the way they're all trackable if you want, you should buy Amazon brand appliances to make use of the feature :)" because as others pointed out here, counter space is at a premium and nobody really wants appliances that don't work with all their ingredients.
Anyway, that's what I tell myself to make this whole ludicrous story less sad.
What makes you think people want those things? I certainly don't, and I've never heard anyone mention wanting any of those things. I have heard people mention that they hate appliances like the coffee makers that only work with the expensive patented coffee pods from their manufacturer. (And printers, etc.)
I don't want any appliance that the manufacturer can shut down or refuse to run remotely. (See the recent story about the guy who paid off his car, but it was disabled remotely because he didn't pay the "remove the disabler" fee.)
In ~35 years of cooking, I don't recall ever using ingredients that went bad. I'm sure I probably did once or twice, but it didn't leave a bad enough impression on me to even remember, let alone want this sort of device that's tethered to the network and manufacturer, with all the problems that brings.
If only we had some kind of olfactory or optical equipment stuck on the front of our faces that could help determine the rottenness or mouldiness of food.
Failing that, perhaps producers of packaged food could use some kind of common standard system to inform consumers of the date by which the food should be used by, or before which it might be at its best.
Things going rotten are not that predictable, even if you know exactly when and where it was packaged.
And even if we're talking cuts of meat, i think technology like MATS(microwave assisted thermal sterilization) may give you high quality meat that doesn't spoil for very long, so that won't be an issue.
And as for suggesting recipes based on fridge content or restocking (are those such big problems for consumers?) - there are probably other ways to solve that , like AI + camera, no need to reshuffle the whole supply chain.
Now I think you could make that stuff better, don't get me wrong, I'm not going to hate on Juicero for that. Their entire play was just VC-Bingo though: they had a device, they had a subscription, they had "lock in" (device is only good with the subscription) they had internet attachment, it's a health and wellness type play, probably some other things I'm not thinking of. Anyone know if they had to subsidize the prices, that'd be the grand slam if they had to do that too. $30 a week for 5 packs of juice, that's $120 a month and you do the work and clean up the mess and you have to get different juice on the weekends. The bags aren't supposed to make that much mess but I think the psychology of it all is huge, a coffee maker doesn't make much mess either and you'll pay a gigantic premium at a coffee shop. How many months before you get a tip-top of the line cold press juicer that'll make juice out of any produce? With no subscription.
The other benefits you mention are marginal at best, in my opinion. I would never pay a premium for tagged and tracked food like that.
Edit: Funny, there's a post on overengineering on the front page!
Going from that to sticking it in a scanner to get permission to eat it probably doesn't add a lot of utility.
I've noticed that the digital multi-flavor soda dispensers create more customer bottlenecks compared the regular 4-6 nozzle dispensers. Having every customer figure out how to load a "juice pack" then operate the machine seems like it would have a similar inconveniencing effect.
You can market it as "fresh".
Cost-wise it is more expensive than buying not-from-concentrate juice in a half gallon quantities, but not that much more so. Definitely <= 100% premium and you get it freshly squeezed right before you.
They also could have just built a "scrappier" v1.0 hardware product at a lower cost (maybe with rollers or something) at 50% BOM cost and subsidized it a bit more. At $200 + $6-8 per pack they might have been successful; at $200 + $200/mo for 30 packs they probably would have been.
And it's far from certain that first business would attract VC's.
I find this line really funny for some reason. (Juicero has been the laughingstock of the tech community over their go to market, pricing, and marketing/business models, and we are now looking at the pieces as they exploded over this fact.)
So I had to try really, really hard not to reply to your innocent comment with mock surprise - like no! You think?
>I think they went about getting to market wrong
I admit to a slightly childish glee in ordering an orange juce and watching the machine peel and juice the fresh oranges. (Mostly I eat actual fruit).
http://www.zumex.com/en
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2000A-4-commercial-ef...
Deleted Comment
Good idea but I don't think it's that easy: the extraction of olive oil is not a simple matter of pressing olives until the oil comes out, but a long process with multiple steps [1] that I doubt they could been done by a press that is relatively simple as/as big as Juicero (as it can be seen by the cons in the two methods for the extraction that are listed on wiki).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_oil_extraction
[0] https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ
> This is what you get with no constraints. Building something that lasts and doesn't break the bank is what's hard. This thing will last forever, but it's a machine to squeeze pre-masticated fruit in a plastic bag that costs $400.
I've watched this before and just skipped through to find that bit, but I'm fairly certain he also mentions at one point how they're almost certainly selling the juicer itself at a loss, which makes the whole thing that much more absurd.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ&t=37m09s
Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ&t=15m07s
and here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ&t=33m42s
https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensi...
But, take a look at the quality of the internals of Juicero vs. Beats headphones and realize that one of the companies is worth $1.5B while the other is shutting down.
Like how do you convince yourself that this is a sane design for something more than a prototype? Using more off the shelf stuff might result a little more weight and a higher overall part count but the cost savings would be huge.
Deleted Comment
- If the machine takes away all my liberty (I cannot use it on my fruit and vegetables) and even their packs need to be refrigerated and stay good only for 8 days, can't I just buy the resulting juice and put it in my fridge? (If I left the bottle closed, that would last equally long). So what do I gain?
- They're using QR codes to check that I'm not using their packs beyond the "best by" date or try to trick the machine into squeezing a competitor's cheaper packs. And for that, they need a camera on the inside. And WiFi. Didn't somebody at some point notice that the way they're treating their customers is really disrespectful? This is the whole printer-cartridge-thing all over again.
EDIT: layout/typos
Humans are weird, and this is a very good marketing strategy.
Nespresso became extremely popular because:
1) The machines are very cheap (compared to other espresso makers)
2) They take a fraction of the time to prepare coffee (compared to other methods)
3) They are extremely easy to clean
4) Capsules have a long shelf life, you can get them in small quantities, so it doesn't matter if you drink 3 cups of coffee per day or 3 cups of coffee per month.
5) They have really fancy stores in top locations where they sell their capsules
Everything about Nespresso is convenient and feels great. There is no DRM, because that would not be convenient.
The only thing that's convenient about the Juicero machine is that it is easy to clean. Everything else about it, from the short shelf live to the subscription pricing, to the long time it takes to make juice, is just inconvenient. The DRM and Wifi requirement is just stupid.
With the Nespresso, I just put the capsule and I get my coffee. The cleaning is easy and I don't need to clean stuff for every coffee.
Sure, you might do a whole bottle of coffee and consume it during the day. But the machine gives you convenience and it is affordable.
I have no problem putting 200-300USD on a coffee machine.
For juice? Well, I like it fresh. I didn't try Juicero but I highly doubt that it compares to freshly squeezed oranges.
[1]: https://www.acemart.com/equipment/beverage/juicers/zumex-ess...
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EXF4PLC/
Also, I think at $50 a lot more people would consider it. Keurig coffee makers seem to have done pretty well and I'm sure the $100 cost was a big part of that (as opposed to charging say > $200).
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/BYaIlV4jFb5/?taken-by=dougevans
With vision like that, it's hard to believe there were any issues.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1793272089/juisir-juici...
...and Juicero even tried to sue them a few months ago:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/juice-wars-juice...
It’s strange they didn’t fail from the very beginning.
Tried it in a bar in San Francisco: slow as fuck, avg juice.