Juicero

» see juicero.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

juicero reached me as a joke before it reached me as a product, and it never actually reached me as a product. in 2017 i was a working engineer in turkey, and the story that crossed into the tech feeds i read was not "silicon valley builds premium juicer." it was a short bloomberg video of two reporters squeezing juicero's expensive produce packs by hand, into a glass, getting just as much juice as the 400 dollar machine made. that clip was the whole product, summarized by the people demonstrating that you did not need it.

the company was founded in 2013 by doug evans, a juice-bar entrepreneur who talked about juicing the way other people talk about religion and who compared himself to steve jobs more than once. the juicero press went on sale in march 2016 at 699 dollars, later cut to about 400. the machine itself was genuinely over-engineered: a precision aluminum frame that applied something like four tons of pressure to a flat pack of pre-chopped produce. the packs were sold by subscription and scanned by the machine over wifi, which meant the press would refuse to work if a pack was out of date or if the servers flagged it.

the money was real. google's venture arm and kleiner perkins were among backers who put about 120 million dollars into the company. for a while the packs sold faster than projected, which is why the price got cut a year early. then on april 19 2017 bloomberg published its piece, the hand-squeezing video spread, and juicero became a meme overnight. the founder's grand juicing philosophy could not survive a six-second clip of a guy wringing a bag into a cup.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the squeeze ~

what made the bloomberg story lethal was not that the machine was bad. the machine worked. the problem was that the machine was pointless. the produce came pre-chopped and sealed in the pack, so all the press did was apply force a human hand could apply almost as well. worse, the wifi check meant the company could refuse to juice produce that had technically expired, on a device you had paid hundreds of dollars to own. it was the perfect specimen of a certain 2010s silicon valley instinct: take a thing that already worked and sell it back wrapped in an app and a subscription.

~ the funny part ~

the funny part is that juicero died fast and clean, which not every flop gets to do. on september 1 2017, sixteen months after the press shipped, the company announced it was shutting down and offered refunds to anyone who wanted one. evans had reportedly tried to find a buyer and failed. the servers went dark and the proprietary packs that were its entire business model stopped being made. people who still owned the machine were left with a heavy aluminum brick that could no longer get permission to squeeze a bag it could have squeezed all along.

~ what it became ~

juicero became shorthand. when a startup builds an expensive connected version of something that did not need to be connected, somebody in the comments still says "it's a juicero." the word outlived the product by years. evans went on to other ventures. the machines themselves turn up on resale sites for almost nothing, bought as curiosities by people who want to own a small monument to the moment silicon valley's faith in itself got squeezed by hand.

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