
Juicero founder defends machine - planetjones
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39664483
======
detaro
previous discussion of the response this article talks about:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160191](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160191)

------
metaphorm
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
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
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.

------
tgb
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-v...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-
valley-s-400-juicer-may-be-feeling-the-squeeze)

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
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
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.

------
planetjones
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."

------
artursapek
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
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.

------
rblatz
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.

~~~
erdbeerkuchen
Here's a video of the insides of a bag:
[https://vimeo.com/214030931](https://vimeo.com/214030931)

~~~
misingnoglic
Thank you! I'm surprised out of all the articles I read, none of them actually
showed what's inside.

------
sethev
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.

~~~
no1youknowz
They did this already:

[http://gizmodo.com/juicero-ceo-begs-you-do-not-open-our-
juic...](http://gizmodo.com/juicero-ceo-begs-you-do-not-open-our-juice-
bags-1794507811)

~~~
maxerickson
Produced by Juicero though.

Seems legit enough, but it's still a classic information problem.

------
paulcole
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."

------
Balgair
"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.

------
csours
Was Juicero a YC company?

------
sureshv
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'.

------
DrNuke
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.

------
tlrobinson
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?

------
antisthenes
CEO defends his product because that's his job.

News at 11.

------
dvdhnt
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
What's wrong with Kid Rock anyway?

~~~
dvdhnt
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.

