Science Juicero, maker of the doomed $400 internet-connected juicer, is shutting down

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/1/16243356/juicero-shut-down-lay-off-refund

Juicero, the company that made its name by creating a proprietary juice-squeezing machine, is shutting down. The announcement comes from Juicero's website. In its post, the company writes that it is suspending the sale of both its juice packets and its Juicero Press device. The last juice packet delivery will occur next week. All customers have up to 90 days to request a refund for their purchase of the Juicero Press, regardless of when they bought it. Fortune reports that employees are being given 60 days notice.

So it's time to say goodbye to Juicero, although we only knew its product for 16 months. The founder of Organic Avenue (a now-bankrupt restaurant chain), Doug Evans, introduced the device in March 2016. At the time, we scoffed at the fact that it cost $699 and required proprietary juice packs. Then in April 2017, Bloomberg published a piece that likely doomed the company to fail. Reporters found that the company's packs of fruits and vegetables didn't require the actual Juicero machine, but were instead squeezeable by hand. Basically, the pricey machine was completely useless, which wasn't a great look for the company.

After that PR catastrophe, Juicero said it hoped to eventually cut the cost of its machine to around $200. It also laid off 25 percent of its staff and offered full refunds, but that appears to not have been sufficient to keep the business afloat. Juicero fell fast. I just hope the bodegas can get a refund.

 

[The Fool]

How the fuck do you spend over $700 to make something that squeezes a bag, and that's literally the only thing it does?

It's made out of water-cut solid-steel and aluminium gears and other top-quality parts. You'd make a fortune scrapping this thing.
They spared no expense to design it. Which is fucking stupid because consumer product manufacturing 101 is to design it to be affordable.

 

[Buer]

Engineers made this? I thought Engineers were supposed to make shit more efficient, not less. It'd cost less time(and money) to just buy a regular juicer and fruit and just use that then to just set this thing up.

 

[Sperglord Dante]

Why the fuck would a juice machine need an Internet connection?

Supposedly the machine would scan the juice packs and alert the user if something was off, e.g. if a batch of apples was infected the company would update its database and your machine would warn you instead of squeezing the spoiled apple juice package.

 

[AngeloTheWizard]

This is the kind of shit that iDubbbz would talk about on his Kickstarter Crap videos.

Well, speaking of that...

 

[The Fool]

Engineers made this? I thought Engineers were supposed to make shit more efficient, not less. It'd cost less time(and money) to just buy a regular juicer and fruit and just use that then to just set this thing up.

"Any idiot can make it complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple."

 

[Quijibo69]

Thinking about this...my bet it was some kind of money laundering scam by Google and/or whoever else. Do I win anything if this ends up being the case in a few years?

 

[CWCchange]

Why the fuck would a juice machine need an Internet connection?

I have a juice machine that costs $10. You put a fucking orange in it and squeeze it and juice comes out.



How the fuck do you spend over $700 to make something that squeezes a bag, and that's literally the only thing it does?

As if Jamba Juice wasn't already a ripoff.

If somebody wants to drink piss from an IV bag, they should move to Canada where milk comes in it.

 

[AnOminous]

Well, speaking of that...

I agree with this dude.

I'm just glad that I only found out about this absolute piece of shit after it ceased to exist, so that my anger that such utter garbage even existed can be wiped out by my satisfaction that stupidity was its own reward and it doesn't any more.

 

[Johnny Bravo]

These videos are too brief for me, here's a forty minute in-depth review:

 

[ZehnBoat]

they could have done better by selling the packets of juice only

 

[Echo_Ender]

This thing has been around for a while and has been pretty much mocked since it's announcement. So this financial ruin was only a matter of time.

I'm more fascinated that ANYONE actually bought one when their entire sales pitch consisted of "You can't operate it without a phone! It only takes our specific juice packets that you have to order! And at $700, it's several times more expensive than far superior Industrial Grade Juicers that have actual buttons and can juice any fruit you want!"

I guess Hipsters fell for the "Organic Juice Packets" and Twitter connectivity?

 

[AnOminous]

These videos are too brief for me, here's a forty minute in-depth review:

Why the fuck is there even a 40 minute video telling you that something that is obviously fucking stupid beyond belief is so stupid that it shouldn't even exist?

 

[Arkangel]

What a shame. It would have been really amusing watching people hack their juicer to get to to accept non-standard 3rd-party juice packs.

 

[AnOminous]

What a shame. It would have been really amusing watching people hack their juicer to get to to accept non-standard 3rd-party juice packs.

This is the most amazing thing about this. There are people, who are actually still alive and somehow haven't stepped into traffic, who bought a device that all it does is squeeze a bag, and they actually paid extra for the fact that unless it's a specific bag with a specific code on it, it doesn't even do what it's designed to do! It can't even squeeze a bag from some other source. They paid a couple hundred extra bucks for the feature of only being able to squeeze a bag with a QRcode on it put there by sleazy scam artists.

Google put $120 million into this btw.

 

[nonnewtonian]

These videos are too brief for me, here's a forty minute in-depth review:

I nearly gagged when he cut open the pouch. I know it's just fruit and vegetable pulp but it still looks so nasty. Guess that explains why there's so little actual juice in the pouches.

 

[AnOminous]

You can't roll out a product like this without thousands of people being involved.

Did literally nobody say, at any point in this process, "Wow. . .this idea is really stupid!"

What remaining faith I have in humanity says yes, somebody did say that.

They were immediately fired.

 

[The Fool]

Why the fuck is there even a 40 minute video telling you that something that is obviously fucking stupid beyond belief is so stupid that it shouldn't even exist?

No, this is the video I was talking about, it's a teardown that shows and explains exactly how over-engineered this thing is. Obviously this thing is stupid, but this shows you all the expensive parts inside of it that don't need to be anywhere near this sophisticated.
I mean shit you could have made this thing out of pure plastic and slapped a Pi* in there. Probably would have cost $20 to manufacture a unit, not $1,000.

*And when I say "Pi" I mean any cheap shitty chinese microcontroller. I'm not joking, I've seen people give away video pamphlets for products with a microcontroller inside them with a hefty 512MB RAM and 1GHz CPU, and this thing was expected to be watched once and thrown out, that's how cheap computers are now.

 

[Chaos Theorist]

2 whole pages without this?

 

[Johnny Bravo]

Why the fuck is there even a 40 minute video telling you that something that is obviously fucking stupid beyond belief is so stupid that it shouldn't even exist?

Because he spends most of the video breaking into it and showing off all the gears and dodads.

 

[Positron]

You can't roll out a product like this without thousands of people being involved.

Did literally nobody say, at any point in this process, "Wow. . .this idea is really stupid!"

What remaining faith I have in humanity says yes, somebody did say that.

They were immediately fired.

Perhaps it was a pee o'sea tranny hambeast who pitched it?