Hard-pressed Juicero boss defends $400 IoT juicer after squeezing $120m from investors Meet this week's bonkers startup Juicero – the San Francisco maker of a $400 fruit juicer that's bagged $120m in funding from investors. The internet-connected gizmo has been dubbed the "Keurig for juice." Juicero founder Doug Evans went as far as comparing himself to Steve Jobs. There's just one little problem with Juicero's …
The problem I see with this is the proprietary nature of it. You spend a considerable amount of money on this, but have to buy THEIR packaged produce...if they go belly up, or hike their prices, you have an expensive piece of counter-clutter. Plus, at $5-8 each, the packs aren't cheap, but, I'm compelled to admit, aren't as pricey as I thought they might be. I, too, have been conditioned by the printer & ink pricing model.
But the best-insulated box won't keep the stuff suitably chilled if its dropped in a sunny area on a hot summer day at 10 or 11 and not retrieved until you get home 6 or 7 hours later...you could have an entire shipment warmed up to unsafe levels.
If you could make your own packs, might be different. You can keep enjoying the thing even if the company rolls over, and you can create your own blends.
Then there's the IoT aspect, which has its own issues. I'd just as soon walk in, load the thing up, and poke the "go" button, then come back later to retrieve the glass of crushed organic matter.
"Plus, at $5-8 each, the packs aren't cheap, but, I'm compelled to admit, aren't as pricey as I thought they might be."
I don't know if you got the price from my comment or elsewhere, but did you note that each pack only produces around 250ml of juice?
Popped over to their website, actually - I was reading the articles, I promise. No, I failed to note that 250ml tidbit. Kind of expected single-serve, though. I would expect this is meant to attract itself to the crowd that's already replaced an actual breakfast with a smoothie, so their pricing reflects this as a meal replacement, not an accompaniment. Given the alternative many people might resort to is a fast-food McBreakfast with who-knows-what in it and coffee for five or six bucks...meh.
Maybe you could "cut" the result with commercial juices and get something more to sip on most of a morning.
This post has been deleted by its author
There are 2240 lb. in a ton (= 1016.0469 kg.), not 2000. You might be confusing "a hundredweight" (which is 8 stone, or 112 lb. [= 50.802345 kg.]) with "a hundred pounds" (= 45.359237 kg).
Now imagine a system whereby the jump from one measuring unit to the next was always a factor of 1000, and a consistent system of prefixes could be applied interchangeably to any of the base units for scaling. Oh, but that would be far too complicated .....
(All conversions courtesy of GNU units.)
@Symon: you are really Adam Goren, and I claim my 5.9715 €!
Atom and his package - LORD IT'S HARD TO BE HAPPY WHEN YOU'RE NOT USING THE METRIC SYSTEM
As has been pointed out above, fresh juice can be healthy and tasty.
I regularly throw a few handfuls of fruit and veg into the juicer and fondly imagine it's doing me some good. But how much? I can see some value in an app which could immediately tell me something like, 'You've just had 50% of your RDA of vitamin D - why not have some carrots? But you're at 100% for vitamin C: well done you.'
Next up: an augmented reality app that surrounds me with a dazzling Ready Brek glow.
And I might be prepared to share my consumption stats with a health insurer in return for reduced premiums. Although they'd have no way of knowing I wasn't following my kale smoothie with half a dozen deep-fried Mars bars and a bottle of Scotch.
The stuff in the packet is no more fresh than the stuff you get pre-juiced in a bottle in the supermarket - unless each bag actually contains solid apples, oranges, kales and broccollis or whatever fad of the week "superfood" they're ripping the piss out of you for then it's half-way juiced already so what's the point?
On the assumption that they're going to claim that pre-juicing it is going to cause vitamins/fibre/sugars/vitamins/someotherbollocks to degrade in some way by the time it gets to you, and that's why you should buy their product, then it's self-demonstrating nonsense dreamed up for and by silicon valley hispters with too much cash. More power to them I say; anyone buying this deserves to lose their money and I'm only sorry it's not being lost in my direction.
Does using a juicer taste better than the juice you buy?
Is it more nutritious?
How will the price compare with buying juice?
Will the veggies be better than the veggies in the bottle? If so, can you tell?
Those are the actual fundamental questions. Unfortunately, this article doesn't even attempt to answer those questions.
The journalist suggests that people can just use their hands, as if labor-saving isn't a trillion pound industry.
The journalist complains that the statement doesn't explain why it's better than a bottle. Well, we don't know either. Maybe the journalist could do some investigation and write an article about it. You know, like the good old days.
I think that this article raises an important question: Is the journalist just writing this shite for the money or do they actually find it enjoyable?
...are soon parted.
His cupboard must be getting pretty full by now. Even from here I can see his Apple Watch, his VR headset, his drone, his connected doorbell, central heating control system, lighting system, kettle, toaster, fridge, scales, cooker, razor, bed, bicycle and nasal hair extractor.
Is there room for this total pile of utter shite as well, I wonder.
I bet he works for Apple or Google as well, in some 'visioneering' team, the twat. I hate him because he gives money to these charlatans.
£400 is nothing to the "stupid rich" who likely still have their servants in an updated format. This is more likely aimed at those who *like to think* they're rich by buying endless overpriced nonsense like this, then wonder why they're in debt.
The BBC had a show about shopaholics a few years back; very often it featured professionals who were on relatively high salaries and yet still on the verge of being declared bankrupt because they frittered their money away on endless fripperies like this.
All I care about is they raised $ 120 million. I mean really? Who are these investors?
Can I sell them my IoT poo machine.. you get ready made poop in a pack and you print it to designer dung shapes using a 3d printer - end result iStools.
No need to eat - comes complete with selfie stick.
Did anyone actually think this through properly? From initial inception, to practical prototype, it is full of fail. It does not solve any problem. It just creates more problems. There seems to be something about the process of extracting juice from fruit that brings out idiots .....
Back in the 1980s, no yuppie kitchen was complete without one of those awful Philippe Starck contraptions that looked like a spaceship from a bad sci-fi movie, on the granite worktop next to the Belfast sink. An iconic masterpiece of industrial design, supposedly, it got juice everywhere except your waiting glass and took too long to clean up afterwards. But at least people looked at it and said "Ooh" or "Aah". Or "Jesus, that is one ugly ..... whatever it's supposed to be ?!"
Now we get this 400-pound gadget, that can only process fruit loaded into a special plastic bag, is unreliable because it depends on an Internet connection, and still does nothing you couldn't do by hand. And since it uses non-biodegradeable plastic bags, the after-use-clean-up time is now properly measured in millennia.
With a device like this, you also ultimately end up throwing away all the benefits of economies of scale. See, fruit being mostly water, it turns out that you can dehydrate it, transport it for long distances in that state and dilute it at the destination; and these processes actually create a significant saving over the cost of transporting something that is, after all, mostly water. Sure, it's no good for the structural integrity of the fruit, but that is not so important here anyway. And, as you learned in Chemistry in the first year of Big School, one molecule of a substance is absolutely identical to and indistinguible from every other molecule of the same substance. Hydrogen oxide out of a tap is exactly the same as hydrogen oxide out of an orange, and anyone who tells you different is -- to use the scientific term -- chatting shit.
Before disposable cartons, it was actually possible to process fruit industrially, and then deliver the reconstituted juice from a local depôt to your door in glass bottles that, once they were empty, only needed to be washed and reused; as opposed to transported several megametres, crushed up, melted down and made into new bottles. In some areas, this was even done using electric vehicles!
The founders presumably thought this was a good idea. The investors may have initially thought the same.
But... California. It seems to be outdoing Florida for sharks and suckers. And they have something in common, like producing a good chunk of America's fresh fruit & veg. Ok, so some growers are diversifying due to realising exporting water isn't necessarily sustainable. But this seems an awfully complicated and ungreen way to get food to consumers. Unlike the good'ol bottle, recycling the packaging is going to be costly, and offset any time saved cleaning a cheaper juicer if you have to wash out the juice bag. And if there's no preservatives, there'll be more waste.. Or mess if they start fermenting and leak.
But most of that stuff isn't the producer's cost, they socialise that. Flogging less than a pound of fruit or veg for $5-10 is all they're interested in.
"And, as you learned in Chemistry in the first year of Big School, one molecule of a substance is absolutely identical to and indistinguible from every other molecule of the same substance."
Hmmm - maybe you should try explaining that to all those who have a lifetime of suffering due to the fact there are two different forms of the Thalidomide molecule, one of which is a mutagen and one of which isn't.
There are, in fact, a number of substances which have distinguishable 'left' and 'right' molecules.
In addition, no water molecules from fruit are not "indistinguishable' from water molecules from a tap - it has long been possible to identify how much of the water content of wine is from the grapes and how much was added during manufacture.
"water molecules from fruit are not "indistinguishable' from water molecules from a tap"
Horseshit. H2O is H2O.
Contaminants in that water, on the other hand, vary from location to location. Measure the ratios of certain contaminants, and you might be able to tell how much water was added by the wine maker. Note the might, it's not a sure bet. How do I know? I make wine as part of my living.
Also note that most wine here in California has at least some water added to the must during fermentation. If you don't add the water, you'll wind up with a "stuck" fermentation due to the high sugar content of our local grapes. See this web page for some details:
https://www.winebusiness.com/tools/?go=winemaking.calc&cid=5
In the gripping hand, beer :-)
Yes, R- and S- thalidomide are different substances. Each molecule contains the same atoms, but they are arranged differently (therefore not identical). They are distinguible by their effect on polarised light. Not sure what point you were making
As for determining water added during manufacture of wine, that is only possible thanks to the cocktail of impurities present in the water. It's not the water molecules themselves.
"Better name, still s**t product"
That's nothing a huge marketing budget couldn't fix.
Oh, and obligatory pop cultural reference: "Is that all it does?"
...that as IT folk, we're unfortunately very well used to squeezing our own juice out regularly, and having to clear up the sad and lonely mess.
How the Juicero CEO should've sold it, is that whilst it's perfectly possible to do your own squeezing, it's much nicer to have someone else do it for you, even if you have to pay regularly for it. So I'm told.
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