4 ms·

Juicero founder defends machine

40 points by planetjones 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tgb 9y ago
I can't get over this quote from a Bloomberg article on this: '[Juicero founder Evans] declared that his juice press wields four tons of force — “enough to lift two Teslas,” he said.' [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-valley-s-400-juicer-may-be-feeling-the-squeeze https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-v...
- tommoor 9y ago
  Well, at least it wasn't "enough to lift MY two Teslas"
  - paulcole 9y ago
    Day and Night Teslas. Always be playing offense!
- JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
  Classic case of overengineering for no reason, when it has been discovered that the packets can be squeezed by hand and yield almost identical amounts of juice.
  - solatic 9y ago
    Not so much of overengineering, but of a failure to properly segment the market and find product-market-fit. Remember, they're putting some serious markup on those pouches (like any "capsule"-style product e.g. Keurig/Nespresso), so they could probably sell the pouches and app (for those features like reminding people to drink before it goes bad) by themselves and make a decent enough profit that way to serve as a foundation for future growth. The $400 machine could then be marketed as the premium, upmarket option - allowing you to freeze the pouches, allowing you to get pouches with fruit and vegetables that are harder to squeeze by hand, etc. Now, the pouches are probably too expensive anyway, and the $400 for an upsell is also probably too expensive anyway, and Jeff Dunn probably raised too much, too quickly (forcing those kinds of high prices), but... that's a different matter.
- bbctol 9y ago
  "Hmmmm, what's an object that's heavy but still shows off my high-tech credentials..."
metaphorm 9y ago
what is going on with all this coverage of a tiny company with an expensive product? is there some kind of media conspiracy going on? I'm legit asking. This story is now running in like 10 different high traffic media sites in the last 24 hours and I had literally never heard of it before this morning. Nor do I care. so can someone clue me in? it smells like there's some weird behind-the-scenes manipulation going on here. something off about this.
- cosmie 9y ago
  Because that tiny company somehow roped in $120mm in funding. And after Bloomberg did a story on it, people realized how absurd it was.
  - api 9y ago
    Keurig is huge. It's a money machine. Why not spin that into another market? Maybe you'll land an easy flip: build it, prove it, and get acquired by the company behind Keurig or some other food product/service mega-corp. Cha-ching. This is reasoning by analogy rather than from first principles. Most people reason mostly by analogy and so therefore most investors reason mostly by analogy. Reasoning by analogy is why these kinds of bad "X but for Y" or "like X but Y" ideas get funded. They look like other successful ideas by simple pattern recognition. Add in a team with good credentials (secondary indicators) and a founder who sends solid alpha-primate signals (matters little unless sales are in-person) and what's not to like? To see why "Keurig for Juice" is a bad idea, we have to look at it from a first principles point of view. Fruit is perishable, and the taste of juice is highly dependent upon the freshness of the source fruit. As a result a juicing machine is really only going to be competitive with pre-packaged juice if the fruit is fresh. Fresh fruit juicers already exist, but they're not super-profitable since there is no recurring revenue angle. You can buy fresh fruit at any supermarket or farmers' market, and indeed doing so is likely going to give you fresher fruit than getting it from a specialized vendor. Fruit is also heavy. It's mostly water. That means shipping it around is expensive, especially when you factor in the need to preserve it at a low temperature (dry ice? thermoses?). That means competing with supermarkets and other experts in food shipping (or local farmers, etc.) is going to be very hard and shipping costs will eat your margins. All that means a Keurig for Juice has to be expensive. That means it has to be a premium product. Premium customers for a juice machine are only going to be interested in it if the juice it produces is very good and very fresh. That in turn amplifies all the problems above in a vicious cycle. In the end you're left with the very top of the premium market, and that market is more likely to buy their premium juice from a restaurant or, at the very top, have their in-home maid/nanny/whatever make them fresh squeezed juice from locally grown fruit. Coffee is different. Coffee is somewhat perishable but nowhere near as perishable as fruit, and it's far easier to package and preserve. It preserves for a long time at room temperature. It can sit on store shelves. It's also small and light and easy to ship. Keurig works because it makes sense from first principles. It's easy to package coffee in a cartridge and it's fairly easy to build a machine to brew it. The result is something more convenient than drip coffee and customers like that, and the cost of doing this is not prohibitively high for either supplier or customer. Fruit fails for the aforementioned reasons. Keurig for fruit makes no sense. Reason from first principles, not by analogy. Reason from first principles, not by analogy. Reason from first principles, not by analogy.
rblatz 9y ago
Has anyone cut open one of these juice packs? It sounds like it's mostly pre squeezed juice and a bit of cut up fruit and veggies.
- colept 9y ago
  That's exactly what it is.
- aleph_naught 9y ago
  I was wondering that myself. Root vegetables like carrots and beets would be really difficult to press by hand.
- erdbeerkuchen 9y ago
  Here's a video of the insides of a bag: https://vimeo.com/214030931 https://vimeo.com/214030931
  - misingnoglic 9y ago
    Thank you! I'm surprised out of all the articles I read, none of them actually showed what's inside.
- knicholes 9y ago
  It sounds like the chunks that have to be later pressed is to present the illusion of freshness. If one wants juice, why can't one have the juice fully "pressed" at the factory, if they insist on the juice being extracted by pressing, and just pour the juice into their cup? (Or have a drinkable pouch, maybe like what is available for baby food, now)
- sndean 9y ago
  So not only is the machine unnecessary, you can drink from the bag? It's the SV version of a Capri Sun?
sethev 9y ago
I really want somebody to cut one of those bags open - it's almost certainly already filled with juice. It seems unlikely that a person could manually squeeze the juice out of raw fruit this way.
- germinalphrase 9y ago
  And certainly not from something that needs to be masticated to release the liquids - like greens/kale/carrots.
- no1youknowz 9y ago
  They did this already: http://gizmodo.com/juicero-ceo-begs-you-do-not-open-our-juice-bags-1794507811 http://gizmodo.com/juicero-ceo-begs-you-do-not-open-our-juic...
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Produced by Juicero though. Seems legit enough, but it's still a classic information problem.
- misingnoglic 9y ago
  Posted by another HN user: https://vimeo.com/214030931 https://vimeo.com/214030931
paulcole 9y ago
the whole thing reads like a solution desperately looking for a problem. would've been refreshing to instead read, "this is an unnecessary gadget for rich juicebros-- get over it."
csours 9y ago
Was Juicero a YC company?
artursapek 9y ago
Companies like this and Keurig that trash our planet to deliver a sub-par product to people who can't be bothered to do it right all deserve to go out of business. Buy a Breville and go to the farmer's market, god damn it.
- terminus 9y ago
  Well said. I'd add Soylent to that list -- they started with sustainable food and now they are pushing Soylent Drink which is basically a throwaway bottle for every 400 calories.
detaro 9y ago
previous discussion of the response this article talks about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160191
planetjones 9y ago
The killer quote for me is: "It’s incredible to come to work everyday alongside hardware and software engineers, food scientists, designers, farmer partners, and all our other team members who are committed to building a new way of delivering raw, plant-based nutrition."
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sureshv 9y ago
Sounds like Nespresso or Keurig for juice. The amount of coffee in both are fractions of what you would use in a real espresso machine or pour over. Those companies are probably minting money and so everyone is going to do this for 'X'.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
teslaberry 9y ago
maybe like the art market----the startup market is becoming a cover for money laundering. launch a completely absurd product claim it 'failed' and then you wash 120 million dollars with perhaps 4 million of real expenditure. perhaps the middle men in the art world laundry became too expensive. it's not easy or cheap laundering 120 million dollars. you cannot do that with a car wash or a restaurant. startups are such ridiculous bullshit that maybe this is your answer. or maybe silicon valley has its fair share of complete fucking moron investors.
dvdhnt 9y ago
My favorite part of the article - > "There are industries giving people diabetes. The leader of the free world just invited Kid Rock to the White House. I think we can give Jeff Dunn a pass on selling veggie juice to software engineers."
- Grue3 9y ago
  What's wrong with Kid Rock anyway?
  - dvdhnt 9y ago
    Nothing is inherently wrong with kid rock. I think the source of that quote was arguing that a lot of bandwidth is being given to a story about a luxury appliance whereas other stories are likely more deserving of that bandwidth.
  - metaphorm 9y ago
    he seems like a bit of a jackass, but I've never met him, so I don't really know. mostly though is the question of why Kid Rock should get invited to white house to meet personally with the president. It's just an obvious and absurd case of political tribalism.
tlrobinson 9y ago
Is there any nutritional value or improved taste to be gained by squeezing a pack of (already mostly pulverized) produce, versus just receiving regular deliveries of relatively fresh juice?
DrNuke 9y ago
How the heck did it walk enough to end like this is the underlying question, more a SV sit-com than business, then the farcical reactions and some rage from probably legit but unknown and unconnected players worldwide.
Balgair 9y ago
"This is just like a Keruig, of course this will eventually work out, look how much money they are making on coffee!" Yes, but coffee is filled with caffeine, a very addictive drug, and juice is not. Look at herbal cigarettes, how many people smoke those daily? If you want these DRM thingys to work, make them actually addictive.
antisthenes 9y ago
CEO defends his product because that's his job. News at 11.

40 points by planetjones 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

tgb 9y ago

I can't get over this quote from a Bloomberg article on this: '[Juicero founder Evans] declared that his juice press wields four tons of force — “enough to lift two Teslas,” he said.' [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-valley-s-400-juicer-may-be-feeling-the-squeeze https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-v...

tommoor 9y ago
Well, at least it wasn't "enough to lift MY two Teslas"
- paulcole 9y ago
  Day and Night Teslas. Always be playing offense!
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
Classic case of overengineering for no reason, when it has been discovered that the packets can be squeezed by hand and yield almost identical amounts of juice.
- solatic 9y ago
  Not so much of overengineering, but of a failure to properly segment the market and find product-market-fit. Remember, they're putting some serious markup on those pouches (like any "capsule"-style product e.g. Keurig/Nespresso), so they could probably sell the pouches and app (for those features like reminding people to drink before it goes bad) by themselves and make a decent enough profit that way to serve as a foundation for future growth. The $400 machine could then be marketed as the premium, upmarket option - allowing you to freeze the pouches, allowing you to get pouches with fruit and vegetables that are harder to squeeze by hand, etc. Now, the pouches are probably too expensive anyway, and the $400 for an upsell is also probably too expensive anyway, and Jeff Dunn probably raised too much, too quickly (forcing those kinds of high prices), but... that's a different matter.
bbctol 9y ago
"Hmmmm, what's an object that's heavy but still shows off my high-tech credentials..."

metaphorm 9y ago

what is going on with all this coverage of a tiny company with an expensive product? is there some kind of media conspiracy going on? I'm legit asking. This story is now running in like 10 different high traffic media sites in the last 24 hours and I had literally never heard of it before this morning. Nor do I care. so can someone clue me in? it smells like there's some weird behind-the-scenes manipulation going on here. something off about this.

cosmie 9y ago
Because that tiny company somehow roped in $120mm in funding. And after Bloomberg did a story on it, people realized how absurd it was.
- api 9y ago
  Keurig is huge. It's a money machine. Why not spin that into another market? Maybe you'll land an easy flip: build it, prove it, and get acquired by the company behind Keurig or some other food product/service mega-corp. Cha-ching. This is reasoning by analogy rather than from first principles. Most people reason mostly by analogy and so therefore most investors reason mostly by analogy. Reasoning by analogy is why these kinds of bad "X but for Y" or "like X but Y" ideas get funded. They look like other successful ideas by simple pattern recognition. Add in a team with good credentials (secondary indicators) and a founder who sends solid alpha-primate signals (matters little unless sales are in-person) and what's not to like? To see why "Keurig for Juice" is a bad idea, we have to look at it from a first principles point of view. Fruit is perishable, and the taste of juice is highly dependent upon the freshness of the source fruit. As a result a juicing machine is really only going to be competitive with pre-packaged juice if the fruit is fresh. Fresh fruit juicers already exist, but they're not super-profitable since there is no recurring revenue angle. You can buy fresh fruit at any supermarket or farmers' market, and indeed doing so is likely going to give you fresher fruit than getting it from a specialized vendor. Fruit is also heavy. It's mostly water. That means shipping it around is expensive, especially when you factor in the need to preserve it at a low temperature (dry ice? thermoses?). That means competing with supermarkets and other experts in food shipping (or local farmers, etc.) is going to be very hard and shipping costs will eat your margins. All that means a Keurig for Juice has to be expensive. That means it has to be a premium product. Premium customers for a juice machine are only going to be interested in it if the juice it produces is very good and very fresh. That in turn amplifies all the problems above in a vicious cycle. In the end you're left with the very top of the premium market, and that market is more likely to buy their premium juice from a restaurant or, at the very top, have their in-home maid/nanny/whatever make them fresh squeezed juice from locally grown fruit. Coffee is different. Coffee is somewhat perishable but nowhere near as perishable as fruit, and it's far easier to package and preserve. It preserves for a long time at room temperature. It can sit on store shelves. It's also small and light and easy to ship. Keurig works because it makes sense from first principles. It's easy to package coffee in a cartridge and it's fairly easy to build a machine to brew it. The result is something more convenient than drip coffee and customers like that, and the cost of doing this is not prohibitively high for either supplier or customer. Fruit fails for the aforementioned reasons. Keurig for fruit makes no sense. Reason from first principles, not by analogy. Reason from first principles, not by analogy. Reason from first principles, not by analogy.

rblatz 9y ago

Has anyone cut open one of these juice packs? It sounds like it's mostly pre squeezed juice and a bit of cut up fruit and veggies.

colept 9y ago
That's exactly what it is.
aleph_naught 9y ago
I was wondering that myself. Root vegetables like carrots and beets would be really difficult to press by hand.
erdbeerkuchen 9y ago
Here's a video of the insides of a bag: https://vimeo.com/214030931 https://vimeo.com/214030931
- misingnoglic 9y ago
  Thank you! I'm surprised out of all the articles I read, none of them actually showed what's inside.
knicholes 9y ago
It sounds like the chunks that have to be later pressed is to present the illusion of freshness. If one wants juice, why can't one have the juice fully "pressed" at the factory, if they insist on the juice being extracted by pressing, and just pour the juice into their cup? (Or have a drinkable pouch, maybe like what is available for baby food, now)
sndean 9y ago
So not only is the machine unnecessary, you can drink from the bag? It's the SV version of a Capri Sun?

sethev 9y ago

I really want somebody to cut one of those bags open - it's almost certainly already filled with juice. It seems unlikely that a person could manually squeeze the juice out of raw fruit this way.

germinalphrase 9y ago
And certainly not from something that needs to be masticated to release the liquids - like greens/kale/carrots.
no1youknowz 9y ago
They did this already: http://gizmodo.com/juicero-ceo-begs-you-do-not-open-our-juice-bags-1794507811 http://gizmodo.com/juicero-ceo-begs-you-do-not-open-our-juic...
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Produced by Juicero though. Seems legit enough, but it's still a classic information problem.
misingnoglic 9y ago
Posted by another HN user: https://vimeo.com/214030931 https://vimeo.com/214030931

paulcole 9y ago

the whole thing reads like a solution desperately looking for a problem. would've been refreshing to instead read, "this is an unnecessary gadget for rich juicebros-- get over it."

csours 9y ago

Was Juicero a YC company?

artursapek 9y ago

Companies like this and Keurig that trash our planet to deliver a sub-par product to people who can't be bothered to do it right all deserve to go out of business. Buy a Breville and go to the farmer's market, god damn it.

terminus 9y ago
Well said. I'd add Soylent to that list -- they started with sustainable food and now they are pushing Soylent Drink which is basically a throwaway bottle for every 400 calories.

detaro 9y ago

previous discussion of the response this article talks about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160191

planetjones 9y ago

The killer quote for me is: "It’s incredible to come to work everyday alongside hardware and software engineers, food scientists, designers, farmer partners, and all our other team members who are committed to building a new way of delivering raw, plant-based nutrition."

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

sureshv 9y ago

Sounds like Nespresso or Keurig for juice. The amount of coffee in both are fractions of what you would use in a real espresso machine or pour over. Those companies are probably minting money and so everyone is going to do this for 'X'.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

teslaberry 9y ago

maybe like the art market----the startup market is becoming a cover for money laundering. launch a completely absurd product claim it 'failed' and then you wash 120 million dollars with perhaps 4 million of real expenditure. perhaps the middle men in the art world laundry became too expensive. it's not easy or cheap laundering 120 million dollars. you cannot do that with a car wash or a restaurant. startups are such ridiculous bullshit that maybe this is your answer. or maybe silicon valley has its fair share of complete fucking moron investors.

dvdhnt 9y ago

My favorite part of the article - > "There are industries giving people diabetes. The leader of the free world just invited Kid Rock to the White House. I think we can give Jeff Dunn a pass on selling veggie juice to software engineers."

Grue3 9y ago
What's wrong with Kid Rock anyway?
- dvdhnt 9y ago
  Nothing is inherently wrong with kid rock. I think the source of that quote was arguing that a lot of bandwidth is being given to a story about a luxury appliance whereas other stories are likely more deserving of that bandwidth.
- metaphorm 9y ago
  he seems like a bit of a jackass, but I've never met him, so I don't really know. mostly though is the question of why Kid Rock should get invited to white house to meet personally with the president. It's just an obvious and absurd case of political tribalism.

tlrobinson 9y ago

Is there any nutritional value or improved taste to be gained by squeezing a pack of (already mostly pulverized) produce, versus just receiving regular deliveries of relatively fresh juice?

DrNuke 9y ago

How the heck did it walk enough to end like this is the underlying question, more a SV sit-com than business, then the farcical reactions and some rage from probably legit but unknown and unconnected players worldwide.

Balgair 9y ago

"This is just like a Keruig, of course this will eventually work out, look how much money they are making on coffee!" Yes, but coffee is filled with caffeine, a very addictive drug, and juice is not. Look at herbal cigarettes, how many people smoke those daily? If you want these DRM thingys to work, make them actually addictive.

antisthenes 9y ago

CEO defends his product because that's his job. News at 11.