15 ms·

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

by jpao79 9y ago

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. https://www.yelp.com/biz/sow-juice-san-francisco https://www.yelp.com/biz/sow-juice-san-francisco

mikesickler 9y ago
Along those same lines, I think spas, fitness centers, salons would have been good segments for them.
reubenswartz 9y ago
Seems like the perfect thing for an airport. :)
- samstave 9y ago
  For Virgin Galactic and SpaceX
  - reubenswartz 9y ago
    Airports are full of $6 lattes and smoothies, $4 bottled water, etc. I would imagine their might be enough folks who want something "healthy" who'd be willing to pay.
    - samstave 9y ago
      I was joking about the aesthetics only
nickparker 9y ago
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.
- cortesoft 9y ago
  How would tracking the food from origin to consumption allow the machine to reject rotten food? Things going rotten are not that predictable, even if you know exactly when and where it was packaged.
  - gerry_shaw 9y ago
    It would apply if the ingredients were contaminated when they were processed but wasn't detected until after they were sold.
  - keerthiko 9y ago
    If it knows when and where for everything about an ingredient, it probably also knows the tagged expiry/best-before. It's easy to play it safe and just reject everything past expiry, even if it need not actually have gone bad. And consumers who prioritize contamination safety (not everyone believes expiry dates, but many do) can respect that. There are cases where something can go bad before its expiry date, due to improper storage, but storage conditions until food reaches given appliance could be tracked too to account for that.
petra 9y ago
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.
korzun 9y ago
The commercial options are cheaper, faster and more durable. This 'appliance' will break in a couple of days.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
They should have started with something that actually used the press. Who wouldn't want fresh olive oil?
- zemnl 9y ago
  > Who wouldn't want fresh olive oil? 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_oil_extraction
dv_dt 9y ago
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.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > What value does this add over stocking various drinks, in containers, in a refrigerated case with no machine? You can market it as "fresh".
  - empath75 9y ago
    if it comes out of a bag, it's not fresh.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      Of course not, but you can still market it that way.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  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.
- JCharante 9y ago
  I don't see a lot of differences between the self serve milkshake machines in gas stations and this proposed self serve juicer.
chx 9y ago
In Europe, some grocery chains have orange press machines so you can make yourself some really fresh orange juice.
- dv_dt 9y ago
  These make more sense to me. I've seen them in various places in the US too. The big difference is that they take in straight oranges from a bin...
overcast 9y ago
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.
- hwillis 9y ago
  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%.
  - wickawic 9y ago
    People might have a misconception about the machine then. I had heard that the juice was easy enough to extract from the pack that you could do it with your hands. This gave me the idea that the pack basically just had juice in it already.
    - microcolonel 9y ago
      It does, it is shredded vegetation in a bag which is squeezed by an amazingly overengineered solid steel screw press with giant, beautiful one-piece plastic moldings on the back. It is also true that you can extract the vast majority of the fluid without the press just fine. It is not "chopped" into "smaller" pieces, but literally shredded.
      - hwillis 9y ago
        Nope; check it out: https://vimeo.com/214030931 https://vimeo.com/214030931 That's mostly carrot (+lemon and orange) but still it's very dry. See also AvE's video[1] where he opens a bag and its full of processed but still largely intact pomegranate. You can squeeze most of a first glass out by hand[2] but that's about it. To get the rest out a press really is necessary- but Juicero isn't just a press. It's massive machined aluminum billets and expensive gears and a custom motor. The huge aluminum parts are likely the biggest cost sink- hundreds of dollars, easily. If they had made the things out of extrusions they could have saved 80%+ on the cost. Just goofy all around. edit: also this... enthusiastic gentleman, who is pretty enthusiastic about the contents of the bag[3] [1]: https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ?t=30m6s https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ?t=30m6s [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lutHF5HhVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lutHF5HhVA [3]: https://youtu.be/wOmB7H6meUQ?t=22m3s https://youtu.be/wOmB7H6meUQ?t=22m3s
rdl 9y ago
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.
- ogreface 9y ago
  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.
  - rdl 9y ago
    The AvE teardown mentioned this. It does give you uniform force across the entire work surface, which is theoretically superior, but I think it's a case where a 5% improvement in results does not warrant 75% increase in BOM cost and design, at least in v1 of a relatively virgin market (if the market were flooded with roller systems, you could possibly differentiate with a press based 1.0, but no need to do that out the gate in a virgin market.)
    - gehwartzen 9y ago
      There is nothing complicated about squeezing something out of a bag with with uniform pressure. The book press / screw press has existed since the first century AD. Here is a 'juicero' that you can fill with whatever chopped fruit you want and get the same/better results: https://www.amazon.com/Fruit-Press-Italian-Stainless-Brewcraft/dp/B00K6OSUDO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1504324186&sr=8-2&keywords=Screw+press https://www.amazon.com/Fruit-Press-Italian-Stainless-Brewcra...
      - dingo_bat 9y ago
        Oh but does it have the food DRM that forces you to buy all your fruits from one company in overpriced bags?
logicallee 9y ago
>I think they went about getting to market wrong. 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
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
keithpeter 9y ago
Zumex is quite common in UK and does not hit the higher end of your price range. 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 http://www.zumex.com/en
- dv_dt 9y ago
  http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/commercial-automatic-orange-squezzer-machine-juicer_60211807192.html http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/commercial-automatic-o... https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2000A-4-commercial-efficient-convenient-simple_60350679207.html?spm=a2700.7724838.2017115.93.3c93b095HiyZua https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2000A-4-commercial-ef...
ptero 9y ago
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.
- boobsbr 9y ago
  Those orange juice squeezers are pretty common in Brussels. Every Carrefour and Delhaize mini markets have them.
DonHopkins 9y ago
They should not have targeted fruits and vegetables with their equipment.
azinman2 9y ago
But I already can buy cheaper juices at the grocery / convenience store. Why would this be any different?
briandear 9y ago
Caffe Macs near Vallco 1 at Apple has Juiceros doing exactly what you describe.
hota_mazi 9y ago
They should have gone, not went.
bobsgame 9y ago
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.
EpicEng 9y ago
I don't think there _is_ a market for this over-engineered, overpriced monstrosity.

by jpao79 9y ago

mikesickler 9y ago

Along those same lines, I think spas, fitness centers, salons would have been good segments for them.

reubenswartz 9y ago

Seems like the perfect thing for an airport. :)

samstave 9y ago
For Virgin Galactic and SpaceX
- reubenswartz 9y ago
  Airports are full of $6 lattes and smoothies, $4 bottled water, etc. I would imagine their might be enough folks who want something "healthy" who'd be willing to pay.
  - samstave 9y ago
    I was joking about the aesthetics only

nickparker 9y ago

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.

cortesoft 9y ago
How would tracking the food from origin to consumption allow the machine to reject rotten food? Things going rotten are not that predictable, even if you know exactly when and where it was packaged.
- gerry_shaw 9y ago
  It would apply if the ingredients were contaminated when they were processed but wasn't detected until after they were sold.
- keerthiko 9y ago
  If it knows when and where for everything about an ingredient, it probably also knows the tagged expiry/best-before. It's easy to play it safe and just reject everything past expiry, even if it need not actually have gone bad. And consumers who prioritize contamination safety (not everyone believes expiry dates, but many do) can respect that. There are cases where something can go bad before its expiry date, due to improper storage, but storage conditions until food reaches given appliance could be tracked too to account for that.

petra 9y ago

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.

korzun 9y ago

The commercial options are cheaper, faster and more durable. This 'appliance' will break in a couple of days.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

They should have started with something that actually used the press. Who wouldn't want fresh olive oil?

zemnl 9y ago
> Who wouldn't want fresh olive oil? 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_oil_extraction

dv_dt 9y ago

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.

pavel_lishin 9y ago
> What value does this add over stocking various drinks, in containers, in a refrigerated case with no machine? You can market it as "fresh".
- empath75 9y ago
  if it comes out of a bag, it's not fresh.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    Of course not, but you can still market it that way.
QAPereo 9y ago
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.
JCharante 9y ago
I don't see a lot of differences between the self serve milkshake machines in gas stations and this proposed self serve juicer.

chx 9y ago

In Europe, some grocery chains have orange press machines so you can make yourself some really fresh orange juice.

dv_dt 9y ago
These make more sense to me. I've seen them in various places in the US too. The big difference is that they take in straight oranges from a bin...

overcast 9y ago

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.

hwillis 9y ago
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%.
- wickawic 9y ago
  People might have a misconception about the machine then. I had heard that the juice was easy enough to extract from the pack that you could do it with your hands. This gave me the idea that the pack basically just had juice in it already.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    It does, it is shredded vegetation in a bag which is squeezed by an amazingly overengineered solid steel screw press with giant, beautiful one-piece plastic moldings on the back. It is also true that you can extract the vast majority of the fluid without the press just fine. It is not "chopped" into "smaller" pieces, but literally shredded.
    - hwillis 9y ago
      Nope; check it out: https://vimeo.com/214030931 https://vimeo.com/214030931 That's mostly carrot (+lemon and orange) but still it's very dry. See also AvE's video[1] where he opens a bag and its full of processed but still largely intact pomegranate. You can squeeze most of a first glass out by hand[2] but that's about it. To get the rest out a press really is necessary- but Juicero isn't just a press. It's massive machined aluminum billets and expensive gears and a custom motor. The huge aluminum parts are likely the biggest cost sink- hundreds of dollars, easily. If they had made the things out of extrusions they could have saved 80%+ on the cost. Just goofy all around. edit: also this... enthusiastic gentleman, who is pretty enthusiastic about the contents of the bag[3] [1]: https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ?t=30m6s https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ?t=30m6s [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lutHF5HhVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lutHF5HhVA [3]: https://youtu.be/wOmB7H6meUQ?t=22m3s https://youtu.be/wOmB7H6meUQ?t=22m3s

rdl 9y ago

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.

ogreface 9y ago
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.
- rdl 9y ago
  The AvE teardown mentioned this. It does give you uniform force across the entire work surface, which is theoretically superior, but I think it's a case where a 5% improvement in results does not warrant 75% increase in BOM cost and design, at least in v1 of a relatively virgin market (if the market were flooded with roller systems, you could possibly differentiate with a press based 1.0, but no need to do that out the gate in a virgin market.)
  - gehwartzen 9y ago
    There is nothing complicated about squeezing something out of a bag with with uniform pressure. The book press / screw press has existed since the first century AD. Here is a 'juicero' that you can fill with whatever chopped fruit you want and get the same/better results: https://www.amazon.com/Fruit-Press-Italian-Stainless-Brewcraft/dp/B00K6OSUDO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1504324186&sr=8-2&keywords=Screw+press https://www.amazon.com/Fruit-Press-Italian-Stainless-Brewcra...
    - dingo_bat 9y ago
      Oh but does it have the food DRM that forces you to buy all your fruits from one company in overpriced bags?

logicallee 9y ago

>I think they went about getting to market wrong. 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

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

keithpeter 9y ago

Zumex is quite common in UK and does not hit the higher end of your price range. 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 http://www.zumex.com/en

dv_dt 9y ago
http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/commercial-automatic-orange-squezzer-machine-juicer_60211807192.html http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/commercial-automatic-o... https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2000A-4-commercial-efficient-convenient-simple_60350679207.html?spm=a2700.7724838.2017115.93.3c93b095HiyZua https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2000A-4-commercial-ef...

ptero 9y ago

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.

boobsbr 9y ago
Those orange juice squeezers are pretty common in Brussels. Every Carrefour and Delhaize mini markets have them.

DonHopkins 9y ago

They should not have targeted fruits and vegetables with their equipment.

azinman2 9y ago

But I already can buy cheaper juices at the grocery / convenience store. Why would this be any different?

briandear 9y ago

Caffe Macs near Vallco 1 at Apple has Juiceros doing exactly what you describe.

hota_mazi 9y ago

They should have gone, not went.

bobsgame 9y ago

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.

EpicEng 9y ago

I don't think there _is_ a market for this over-engineered, overpriced monstrosity.