It seems insane to pay $700 for a press and then paying for expensive chopped up vegetable and fruit in a bag... just so you can consume a whole lot of sugar.
https://www.juicero.com/the-packs/just-greens/ 2g of sugar per 8oz. While it is the only one with even close to that amount, it's the one I'd get (I used to make a juice very similar). That's barely any sugar.
Everyone writes off juice as having "a ton of sugar", and yeah, if you make it with only fruit it will. If you use vegetables, the thing that is hardest to eat a lot of, then you are fine.
$700 is alot, although any high quality juicer is going to be in the range of 300-500+. A hydraulic press juicer is going to be the best you can get, extracting everything out of the fruit and vegetables without building up heat.
The cost of the bags are at about $5-$8(I see $5 and $6 on their website so far). Which isn't really that bad. There is zero cleanup, chopping, and planning . I juiced daily for about 2-3 months straight for breakfast, and it takes up a lot of time and money. It was about 30-45 minutes to chop and prepare everything, then sit and run it through the juicer, then disassemble the juicer to clean everything.
The costs for all vegetables added an extra $30-$40 a week to my grocery bill. But I ate the same juice every day as that is what I could prepare for. It was a struggle to make sure everything was still good, and I was throwing away food weekly because it goes bad (sizes of packaged produce varied so it was tough to plan). I wasn't buying organic vegetables, so I saved a bunch of money there.
Honestly for the time savings and the hassle free way to consume, I think the product can work. This would be a great addition to many companies break rooms, and far healthier than any of the other options they provide. I have no idea whether then can make back all the money that's been invested, but we shall see.
How many ounces of juice did you drink per day? $5-$8 for 8oz of juice seems pricey. That's the size of a "Short" Starbucks drink... I don't even want my coffee that size.
I like juice and I like kitchen gadgets but wow, this thing is expensive. The only thing it would buy is not having to hassle with owning and using a juicer.
One is still left with the per drink cost, which at these prices does not quite compete with simply going to a juice bar.
This is a very niche and expensive product. I'd worry about the company being around long enough to realize the benefit of owning it.
Don't mean to be contrary here, but why do all of these "back to nature food" things seem, upon closer inspection, to factor down being a way for rich people to once again give mother earth another good poke in the eye with a sharp, plastic, non-degradable stick?
How is this not just Keurig-ing the process of tossing veggies from the local into your blender into a cross-country, plastic-generating, fuel-burning waste-a-thon to prove how very extra-special and enlightened you are? C'mon. Chi? Life force? In a disposable plastic pouch dropped off by Fed-Ex? Dawkins would have a field day.
>> How is this not just Keurig-ing the process of tossing veggies from the local into your blender
Not contrarian at all. From TFA:
"Finally, there are the environmental questions about the single-serve model pioneered by coffee companies such as Keurig and Nespresso, which creates a throwaway container with each serving. Every glass of Juicero juice needs its own pack, which gets shipped from Los Angeles to the customer, although Mr. Evans said he was developing a compostable pack."
That's exactly what it is, K-Cups of juice, and it's genius. People love throwing things away instead of cleaning.
And like K-Cups, Juicero has already created a system to lock out generic veggie bags past their patent with the barcode scan to check freshness.
The $700 might be worth it if you were able to use your own reusable veggie squash bag, in addition to their premixes. But, it seems like the smart machines themselves might be sold at-cost if they've built out a distribution network for expensive pouches.
The difference is that this uses pressing to get the juice instead of cutting/blending. There is a lot of information out there about how pressing is better, but I am unsure how much of it is bullshit.
Getting a good pressing machine to use at home is a couple to few hundred dollars. Plus it's time consuming to buy the veggies, cut them yourself, get out the presser and assemble the pieces, feed the veggies into the presser, wait for it to press, then clean all the pressing pieces and put it back away. The entire process minus shopping for veggies is probably 10-15 minutes.
Some of it is definitely bullshit. From the article:
>“Organic cold-pressed juice is rainwater filtered through the soil and the roots and the stems and the plants,” he said. “You extract the water molecules, the chlorophyll, the anthocyanin and the flavonoids and the micronutrients. You’re getting this living nutrition. It’s like drinking the nectar of the earth.”
The water molecules, eh? Bet those are better for being cold-pressed. Also all that essential chlorophyll that we absolutely need in our diet...
> "but why do all of these "back to nature food" things seem, upon closer inspection, to factor down being a way for rich people to once again give mother earth another good poke in the eye with a sharp, plastic, non-degradable stick?"
I had a similar impression when reading this article. It sounded dystopian to me -- a way to extract money from people with little sense, while not providing much benefit, and offsetting whatever benefit is provided with an oddly high-waste product. I'm sure there are people who see this as a positive value proposition, but it seems to me that it's worse than every alternative -- less convenient and more expensive than pre-bottled juice (even the probiotic stuff that tastes like yard waste), considerably more wasteful than frozen concentrate, lower-quality output than throwing veggies from your local stand into a blender. "Chi" and "life force" are poor substitutes.
Because the ones you don't hear about don't have the profit margins to sustain a massive advertising/marketing budget.
It's the mechanism by which advertising becomes a tremendously negative signal to me: if you can afford to spend that much money pushing your product, you're extracting a large price premium over your costs and my value.
There could be a small market for that product after all. Think there are a lot of people in SoCal that would pay insane amounts for trendy products like this.
The fact that this thing has raised $100 Million in funding is why I can't take anyone seriously when they talk about VCs, especially when they talk about them making decisions.
You can eat the fruits and vegetables whole, juice and all, and you don't need the machine and its plastic pouches. I don't get it. Why throw away all the fiber?
"Studies show that like frozen produce, canned produce – provided it is free of added salt and sugars – has a nutrient value that is often as good as, if not better than, that of fresh produce."
Can you retitle this to say "Juicer" instead of "Juice Box"?
Saying "Juice Box" is just click bait so people will gasp at the idea of a juice box so expensive, then you read it and realize it's actually a juicer.
(Sorry for putting this as a reply to this thread - not sure how else to ask for a retitle.)
For me, eating healthy and exercising routinely requires a lifestyle change. It almost seems contradicting, but if I am going to consistently eat healthy, it needs to consume a larger portion of my life. By sacrificing the money and time to choose and buy vegetables/fruits, prepare, and consume them , I am more likely to continue this process because I don't want to waste that sacrifice.
So for me, products like Juicero that reduce the healthy part of eating to a sacrifice-less convenience would make it a novelty item that wouldn't force me to change my lifestyle and therefor fail to create consistency and tenacity in my healthy eating habits.
From my buying perspective, this product would be just grouped in with the other 'magic' pills and 'get-rich-quick' solutions to becoming healthier.
Sure, you can boil anything down to a contrived sentence that misses the point, but I never once mentioned it being painful. It's much more about building habits, and it's up to you to decide if habits are meant to be painful or not. Choosing healthy ingredients, researching recipes, cooking while I listen to a podcast, and then enjoying a nice meal with good company isn't what I consider painful.
If people are willing to pay $400 for this[1], which is a manual juice press kludged out of a $12.95 automotive jack.[2], they might go for this $700 device.
And that's before they've hooked the user on the proprietary packs. The thing has DRM, and requires WiFi and an Internet connection just to validate the packs. It has no other legitimate need for an Internet connection. Since it doesn't do anything on its own, it has nothing to say to the user remotely.
Even the guy who invented the Keurig is now fed up with the company. And Keurig was forced to give up on the DRM.[3]
I juice with the "Breville BJE200XL Compact Juice Fountain 700-Watt Juice Extractor." $99 on Amazon[0] (4.5/5 star rating out of 4,835 reviews). You don't have to chop anything--it's large enough to fit in small apples, pears, beets, etc. Carrots go straight in. Clean up is a breeze with three large easy parts (I clean while drinking my juice). It makes 25 oz of juice max versus 8 oz of this "Juice Box."
So in other words--I love juice but will be sticking with my cheapo juicer.
Get out of my way! Off to create the Guicero(sic) Replacement Pouch. Buy once. Chop chop. Press press. Rinse twice. Repeat. Just $65. Dishwasher-safe version $119. Call now, and you'll receive a 2 month farm-to-table membership valued at $200.
I think I need about $20MM and four boxes of Ziplock bags to get started. Who's with me!
This is why they have a camera in the juicer to take a picture of the juice packet's QR code which it sends over your wifi to verify with Juicero headquarters that you are using an authentic juice packet. I'm sure with a hack saw, a soldering iron, and a decent knowledge of reprogramming embedded systems you could turn it into a less smart juicer.
Meh. Keurig tried the same thing. People cut the lid off a legit pod and taped it on the lid of the refill thingamabob or in the DRM-Keurig machine itself. I accept the challenge!
(I was also facetious. If this isn't an long con April 1st joke, I'll convert all my tech stock into cash next week because I've seen this nonsense in the first bubble...)
I wonder if people who are into juicing really want to have vegetables cut way in advance as they're less nutritious that way. It's nice though that they show the farms the vegetables come from. But anyway I think smoothies are healthier.
This is one of the funniest articles I've seen the NY Times publish in months. It seems intentionally written to be referred back to when people ask in future decades about the Roaring Teens Funding Bubble.
Say what you like about the first dot-com bubble, but those founders were at worst naive. In today's SV, we seem to have actively embraced malevolent business models. Make something slightly more convenient, then use subtle psychological tricks to exploit your customers.
A $700 juicer with DRM? Individual plastic pouches for a few ounces of vegetables? You can dress that up with new-age buzzwords, but it's an awful way to make a living. A mountain of waste and expense just to avoid the inconvenience of chewing your food.
There's a vulgarity to all of this. A naked, grasping search for recurring revenue at any cost. I recently saw a book entitled Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products with a front-cover endorsement by Eric Ries. Those are the ethics of Philip Morris, without a hint of embarrassment.
Maybe we've picked all the low-hanging fruit. Maybe there are no more good businesses left. Maybe you can't make a profit by selling a useful product at a fair price. Maybe the future of business is just wringing money out of people with dark patterns. I hope not.
I hate this almost as much as I hate the Keurig machines. Not only because the coffee is terrible and it's incredibly wasteful, but also what it was about American culture.
49 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadhttp://www.businessinsider.com/juicero-raises-120-million-20...
It seems insane to pay $700 for a press and then paying for expensive chopped up vegetable and fruit in a bag... just so you can consume a whole lot of sugar.
Everyone writes off juice as having "a ton of sugar", and yeah, if you make it with only fruit it will. If you use vegetables, the thing that is hardest to eat a lot of, then you are fine.
$700 is alot, although any high quality juicer is going to be in the range of 300-500+. A hydraulic press juicer is going to be the best you can get, extracting everything out of the fruit and vegetables without building up heat.
The cost of the bags are at about $5-$8(I see $5 and $6 on their website so far). Which isn't really that bad. There is zero cleanup, chopping, and planning . I juiced daily for about 2-3 months straight for breakfast, and it takes up a lot of time and money. It was about 30-45 minutes to chop and prepare everything, then sit and run it through the juicer, then disassemble the juicer to clean everything.
The costs for all vegetables added an extra $30-$40 a week to my grocery bill. But I ate the same juice every day as that is what I could prepare for. It was a struggle to make sure everything was still good, and I was throwing away food weekly because it goes bad (sizes of packaged produce varied so it was tough to plan). I wasn't buying organic vegetables, so I saved a bunch of money there.
Honestly for the time savings and the hassle free way to consume, I think the product can work. This would be a great addition to many companies break rooms, and far healthier than any of the other options they provide. I have no idea whether then can make back all the money that's been invested, but we shall see.
How do you figure? Do you find them difficult to cook or something?
One is still left with the per drink cost, which at these prices does not quite compete with simply going to a juice bar.
This is a very niche and expensive product. I'd worry about the company being around long enough to realize the benefit of owning it.
How is this not just Keurig-ing the process of tossing veggies from the local into your blender into a cross-country, plastic-generating, fuel-burning waste-a-thon to prove how very extra-special and enlightened you are? C'mon. Chi? Life force? In a disposable plastic pouch dropped off by Fed-Ex? Dawkins would have a field day.
Sorry for the rant.
>> How is this not just Keurig-ing the process of tossing veggies from the local into your blender
Not contrarian at all. From TFA:
"Finally, there are the environmental questions about the single-serve model pioneered by coffee companies such as Keurig and Nespresso, which creates a throwaway container with each serving. Every glass of Juicero juice needs its own pack, which gets shipped from Los Angeles to the customer, although Mr. Evans said he was developing a compostable pack."
And like K-Cups, Juicero has already created a system to lock out generic veggie bags past their patent with the barcode scan to check freshness.
The $700 might be worth it if you were able to use your own reusable veggie squash bag, in addition to their premixes. But, it seems like the smart machines themselves might be sold at-cost if they've built out a distribution network for expensive pouches.
Just buy a Juicer - there are plenty on the market.
The point of this is so you don't have to peel the produce yourself, it comes nicely prepacked for you - for a modest extra fee of course.
Getting a good pressing machine to use at home is a couple to few hundred dollars. Plus it's time consuming to buy the veggies, cut them yourself, get out the presser and assemble the pieces, feed the veggies into the presser, wait for it to press, then clean all the pressing pieces and put it back away. The entire process minus shopping for veggies is probably 10-15 minutes.
>“Organic cold-pressed juice is rainwater filtered through the soil and the roots and the stems and the plants,” he said. “You extract the water molecules, the chlorophyll, the anthocyanin and the flavonoids and the micronutrients. You’re getting this living nutrition. It’s like drinking the nectar of the earth.”
The water molecules, eh? Bet those are better for being cold-pressed. Also all that essential chlorophyll that we absolutely need in our diet...
I had a similar impression when reading this article. It sounded dystopian to me -- a way to extract money from people with little sense, while not providing much benefit, and offsetting whatever benefit is provided with an oddly high-waste product. I'm sure there are people who see this as a positive value proposition, but it seems to me that it's worse than every alternative -- less convenient and more expensive than pre-bottled juice (even the probiotic stuff that tastes like yard waste), considerably more wasteful than frozen concentrate, lower-quality output than throwing veggies from your local stand into a blender. "Chi" and "life force" are poor substitutes.
It's the mechanism by which advertising becomes a tremendously negative signal to me: if you can afford to spend that much money pushing your product, you're extracting a large price premium over your costs and my value.
It's only occasionally wrong.
"Studies show that like frozen produce, canned produce – provided it is free of added salt and sugars – has a nutrient value that is often as good as, if not better than, that of fresh produce."
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/really-the-claim-fr...
Fuck these terrible 1%-er vegans and the horse they walked gently over here with.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11400605 and marked it off-topic.
Saying "Juice Box" is just click bait so people will gasp at the idea of a juice box so expensive, then you read it and realize it's actually a juicer.
(Sorry for putting this as a reply to this thread - not sure how else to ask for a retitle.)
https://soundcloud.com/venturedpodcast/pitching-a-vc#t=4:00
So for me, products like Juicero that reduce the healthy part of eating to a sacrifice-less convenience would make it a novelty item that wouldn't force me to change my lifestyle and therefor fail to create consistency and tenacity in my healthy eating habits.
From my buying perspective, this product would be just grouped in with the other 'magic' pills and 'get-rich-quick' solutions to becoming healthier.
And that's before they've hooked the user on the proprietary packs. The thing has DRM, and requires WiFi and an Internet connection just to validate the packs. It has no other legitimate need for an Internet connection. Since it doesn't do anything on its own, it has nothing to say to the user remotely.
Even the guy who invented the Keurig is now fed up with the company. And Keurig was forced to give up on the DRM.[3]
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Welles-or-Peoples-Juice-Press/dp/B001A... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Torin-T90203-Hydraulic-Bottle-Jack/dp/... [3] http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/5/7986327/keurigs-attempt-to-...
Throwing away a plastic container after every serving is what chi is all about, those other products simply don't have it!
So in other words--I love juice but will be sticking with my cheapo juicer.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Breville-BJE200XL-Fountain-700-Watt-Ex...
I think I need about $20MM and four boxes of Ziplock bags to get started. Who's with me!
(I was also facetious. If this isn't an long con April 1st joke, I'll convert all my tech stock into cash next week because I've seen this nonsense in the first bubble...)
Relevant: "Fruit juice isn't much better for you than soda. Let's stop pretending otherwise." http://www.vox.com/2016/3/25/11305614/soda-juice-energy-drin...
Say what you like about the first dot-com bubble, but those founders were at worst naive. In today's SV, we seem to have actively embraced malevolent business models. Make something slightly more convenient, then use subtle psychological tricks to exploit your customers.
A $700 juicer with DRM? Individual plastic pouches for a few ounces of vegetables? You can dress that up with new-age buzzwords, but it's an awful way to make a living. A mountain of waste and expense just to avoid the inconvenience of chewing your food.
There's a vulgarity to all of this. A naked, grasping search for recurring revenue at any cost. I recently saw a book entitled Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products with a front-cover endorsement by Eric Ries. Those are the ethics of Philip Morris, without a hint of embarrassment.
Maybe we've picked all the low-hanging fruit. Maybe there are no more good businesses left. Maybe you can't make a profit by selling a useful product at a fair price. Maybe the future of business is just wringing money out of people with dark patterns. I hope not.