# Juicero (2013 – 2017)

- URL: https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/startup-graveyard/juicero/
- Sector: Hardware
- Country: United States
- Total funding: $120 million
- Cause of closure: Product problems

## What did it do?

Juicero was a company that designed and sold the Juicero Press, a Wi-Fi-connected cold-press juicer for fruit and vegetables. The machine worked only with single-use packs of pre-chopped fruit and vegetables that the company sold on subscription. It would not press until it had read and verified the QR code on each pack.

## Why did it shut down?

Launched in March 2016 at $699, the machine sold slowly, and in January 2017 its price was cut to $399, well ahead of plan. In April 2017 Bloomberg showed that the packs could easily be squeezed by hand and that the resulting juice was almost indistinguishable from the machine's. The story made the company a laughing stock; Juicero offered all its customers a refund. The QR code on the packs, which worked as a lock blocking other manufacturers' packs, also drew criticism. In September 2017 the company halted sales, began buying back the machines and announced that it was looking for a buyer.

## The story

In April 2017 Bloomberg published a simple experiment: when Juicero's fruit packs were squeezed by hand, the juice was almost indistinguishable from what the company's expensive machine produced. Within days Juicero had become a symbol of Silicon Valley inventing needless problems for itself.

Founded by Doug Evans in San Francisco in 2013, the company aimed to turn cold-pressed juice at home into a subscription business. The Wi-Fi-connected Juicero Press worked only with packs of pre-chopped fruit and vegetables sold by the company. The packs, costing between $5 and $7 each, had a shelf life of about eight days, and the machine would not press until it had read and verified the QR code on each one. The industrial design was handled by Fuseproject, Yves Béhar's studio. Between 2014 and 2017 the company raised $120 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins and Google Ventures.

The machine launched in March 2016 at $699, but sales remained slow. In October 2016 Jeff Dunn, former president of Coca-Cola North America, became CEO. In January 2017 the price was cut to $399, 12 to 18 months earlier than planned. After Bloomberg's story the company argued that squeezing by hand was messy and made for a poor user experience, then offered a full refund to all dissatisfied customers. Criticism also grew that the QR code system was not about safety but a lock blocking other manufacturers' packs. Venture capitalist Ben Einstein, who took the device apart, described the machine as an extraordinarily complex piece of engineering and argued that a simpler design could produce juice of similar quality for hundreds of dollars less.

On 1 September 2017 Juicero stopped selling machines and packs, began buying the machines back from its customers and announced that it was looking for a buyer with a national fresh-food supply chain for the company and its intellectual property. According to the statement, building an effective nationwide production and distribution system required infrastructure they could not achieve on their own.

Juicero shows that slick design and powerful investors mean nothing when they do not answer the customer's real question: could I get the same result without this device?

## Lessons

- Before launch, test whether your hardware is really necessary for the customer by comparing it with the simplest alternative (here, squeezing by hand).
- A device designed without a cost ceiling drives up the price; write the target price at the very start of the engineering process.
- A design that locks users into your own consumables amplifies the backlash if it does not deliver value.

## Sources

- [Juicero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero)
- [Squeezed out: widely mocked startup Juicero is shutting down](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/01/juicero-silicon-valley-shutting-down)
- [Silicon Valley's $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-valley-s-400-juicer-may-be-feeling-the-squeeze)