This was bad enough but the founder/CEO Doug Evans moved on the push “Raw Water” https://www.myrecipes.com/extracrispy/the-founder-of-juicero-is-now-shilling-for-a-fearmongering-raw-water-brand and is now onto sprouts as a healthy lifestyle superfood that does everything. He is a charismatic huckster that people still want to believe.
“When I was a little boy in New York City in the 1940s, we swam in the Hudson River and it was filled with raw sewage okay? We swam in raw sewage! You know... to cool off! And at that time, the big fear was polio; thousands of kids died from polio every year but you know something? In my neighbourhood, no one ever got polio! No one! Ever! You know why? Cause we swam in raw sewage! It strengthened our immune systems! The polio never had a prayer; we were tempered in raw shit! So personally, I never take any special precautions against germs. I don't shy away from people that sneeze and cough, I don't wipe off the telephone, I don't cover the toilet seat, and if I drop food on the floor, I pick it up and eat it! Yes I do. Even if I'm at a sidewalk café! In Calcutta! The poor section! On New Year's morning during a soccer riot! And you know something? In spite of all that so-called risky behaviour, I never get infections, I don't get them, I don't get colds, I don't get flu, I don't get headaches, I don't get upset stomach, you know why? Cause I got a good strong immune system and it gets a lot of practice. My immune system is equipped with the biological equivalent of fully automatic military assault rifles with night vision and laser scopes, and we have recently acquired phosphorous grenades, cluster bombs, and anti-personnel fragmentation mines. So when my white blood cells are on patrol recon ordering my blood stream seeking out strangers and other undesirables, if they see any, ANY suspicious looking germs of any kind, they don't fuck around!
They whip out their weapons; they wax the motherfucker and deposit the unlucky fellow directly into my colon! Into my colon! There's no nonsense, there's no Miranda warning, there's none of that “three strikes and you're out” shit, first defense, BAM... into the colon you go! And speaking of my colon, I want you to know I don't automatically wash my hands every time I go to the bathroom okay? Can you deal with that? Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. You know when I wash my hands? When I shit on them! That's the only time. And you know how often that happens? Tops, TOPS, 2-3 times a week tops! Maybe a little more frequently over the holidays, you know what I mean? And I'll tell you something else my well-scrubbed friends... you don't need to always need to shower every day, did you know that? It's overkill, unless you work out or work outdoors, or for some reason come in intimate contact with huge amounts of filth and garbage every day, you don't always need to shower. All you really need to do is to wash the four key areas; armpits, asshole, crotch, and teeth. Got that? Armpits, asshole, crotch, and teeth. In fact, you can save yourself a whole lot of time if you simply use the same brush on all four areas!”
—George Carlin
>Chloramine, and on top of that they’re putting in fluoride. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it’s a mind-control drug that has no benefit to our dental health.”
OK, your a conspiracy theorist.
This is why our policitcs is the way it is lol
I see him around Venice, California from time to time. Every girl knows he’s a creepy, creepy dude. If he was slightly more popular pretty sure he’d be in jail by now.
"unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized spring water, also referred to as “raw water.”
Hu? That's ... just what we call "[mineral water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_water)" or "spring water" ?
What exactly is there to "push"?
Mineral water can be and often is filtrated, treated to remove iron, manganese, sulfur and/or arsenic, and sterilized with ozone though. Not saying those are bad things to do, many mineral springs would be unusable without it as they often contain significant amounts of sulfur (not dangerous, but causing a bad taste) and excess iron (makes the water murky brown). But it does mean that mineral water isn't necessarily the same as "raw water".
So they treat mineral water by removing all the minerals? Fuck big water, If I paid for minerals I want an entire unadulterated periodic table with every sip!
A guy who makes his money off of scams and has lived his entire life in a developed country shilling untreated water because of a conspiracy theory? If god was real this man would've smothered in his cradle.
if id live next to their water source i would personally shit in their water source every day until they understand that modern water treatment is probably one of the best and most livesaving invention ever...
The WiFi and overall concept were stupid.
But the machine itself was also stupidly expensive in part because they overengineered the shit out of it.
>venture capitalist Ben Einstein considered the press to be "an incredibly complicated piece of engineering", but that the complexity was unnecessary and likely arose from a lack of cost constraints during the design process. It was described as being built to the specifications of commercial foodservice equipment, meant for heavy daily use, rather than a consumer appliance. A simpler and cheaper implementation, suggested Einstein, would likely have produced much the same quality of juice at a price several hundred dollars cheaper.
Yes, the cheaper machine would likely have half the lifespan of the Juicero, but that lifespan would probably still be measured in years if not decades. Same reason my food processor at home costs a quarter, probably less, than the Robot Coupe I use at work. It doesn't need to be engineered to run for hours of use every day when I use it for twenty minutes a week.
i watched a teardown video if i remember the parts that press the packet was machined from solid chunks of aluminum which is insane. i wonder if a few chunks of wood and some acme threaded steel rod would work just as well
Considering people's hands worked just fine...I'm gonna go with yes.
Also, if it's just squeezing packs, is it really a juicer? Or is it just a fancy juice package opener?
That was the scandal. They made it sound like you were inserting packages that contained fresh fruits and veggies and the machine's incredible strength made it all possible. That's why you had to have the QR codes and pre-packaged containers, otherwise it wouldn't be "safe" in the hands of just any old idiot meemaw with a carrot. And then journalists discovered, no, it was just prepackaged juice that was squeezed out, so there was a bit of deception at the heart.
Yeah, and from what I remember, big part of the QR system was to really enforce expiration dates, because the juice was unpasteurized, and during development, an unpasteurized juice (Naked?) got a bunch of people sick.
So, it's even more stupid than it sounds. At first glance, it really does feel like a scam where they lock you in to their ridiculously expansive system of pre-packed fruits, and then they sell you the cheapest juice possible to squeeze the most money out of you.
But nah, they made an expansive, over-engineered bag squeezer, and then they made the most unoptimized "pulp in a bag" system, so they weren't even scamming people with their disastrous product. Wow.
They scammed themselves. It genuinely seems like they were trying to make a consumer friendly product but built the entire system on the stupidest fucking idea ever.
It's basically a case of "this can all be adequately and truthfully explained by stupidity", in that case the stupidity of thinking so hard it turned a very simple process into something needlessly complicated.
It also *radically* reduced the market range for shipping, because with a shelf life of (I think) 5 days, that would absolutely kneecap how far it could be shipped
>an unpasteurized juice (Naked?)
It was Odwalla. E. coli contaminated apple juice.
These weirdos are really afraid of warming things up to kill bacteria.
I'm a microbiologist and a firm believer of pasturization. I don't think anything "raw" has any real health benefit except maybe some specific niche cases.
With that said, pasturization can affect the flavour of things, especially fuits and fruit juices. The point of a juicer is fresh juice, so I would be very disappointed if the packages were pasturized because it absolutely would affect the flavour which ignoring all the health BS is the main point of freshly squeezed juice.
The only other workable method is ultrafiltration but that doesn't work for many fruit juices because it would remove the pulp and solids, and it certainly wouldn't work in this case which was packages of pulp.
In my opinion, their best bet would have to be storing and shipping them frozen.
None of this however eliminates the danger of contaminated source material which necessitates very strict QC of incoming fruit and plant sanitization. Plenty of food born pathogens come from farm side contamination and don't really need time to grow in the processed food. Expiration dates in those cases really don't matter.
Yeah and it was just extremely wasteful overall... I mean, if they had built a machine where you could just toss fruit into it and it would do the whole process of washing, skinning, coring, squeezing, that would've been quite a trick...and much more environmentally responsible.
for a single typeof fruit thats doable but i dont think that it would be feasable to build a machine that cam do it for for example bananas apples and oranges at the same time givem the fact that they have wildly different shapes and the peeling and preperation process is different
I feel like I’m crazy consumer grade juicing machines already exist and it’s so much simpler than your ideas. You don’t need to peel or core fruit to juice it.
We had one that shredded the fruit and centrifuged the juice out. If I remember correctly it had a shredding blade at the bottom (like a circular cheese grater) and like a rotating sieve around. You would put the fruit chunks into a hole and push it down with a piece that fit that hole, and the machine would destroy pretty much anything. It was pretty tall and wide, probably due to the motor. It could deal with anything you could make fit the hole, and the only reason to remove anything from the fruit was if you didn't want the taste. So many intrusive thoughts about sticking a finger in there, I was too young for the other intrusive thought.
I still have my family's one. Made in commie times, the motor still works, the plastic looks a bit worse for wear. It gets out of the cupboard one or two times a year at most, when I remember I have it.
This really sounds like a managerial coordination issue. Like, originally it probably was supposed to be some sort of cold press juicing machine that did press fresh fruit - which would explain why it's engineered by such strong materials.
It feels like the supply chain guys probably didn't realise how expensive transporting fresh fruit is, or how difficult and then got to the point where they ran into the truth that actually the real expensive part of fresh fruit is picking and shipping it all in one piece, and that if you just crush it into a pulp before you ship it, and pop it into a sealed bag, it ships much better.
But now you're too deep in and you've already told all the investors that everyone needs your expensive press in their homes.
Below comment is slightly incorrect, it was sort of a pre-grated/diced 'pulp' that came in the packs. Not pure liquid or juice, there was still actual 'juicing' going on, just not a lot (definitely not, like, an otherwise pristine apple and head of broccoli or whatever).
it is in fact not a juicer since you can't put any actual fruits or vegetables into the machine it just squeezes capri suns into a cup for you without making a mess
anyways that'll be 420 dollars
>i watched a teardown video if i remember the parts that press the packet was machined from solid chunks of aluminum which is insane.
It was machined high quality aluminium, big metal screw for the press, machined out custom aluminum struts, 3" tapered roller bearing, custom machined gears, custom fancy rubber seals, expensive plastics, massive overpowered motor(actually multiple motors), custom sensors, etc.
The guidance pins literally form an air cushion as you push them in, because of the tight machining tolerances. They basically threw money at the engineers.
They were selling it at a huge loss and banking on the subscription service.
EDIT [AvE teardown](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ)
Even just cast aluminium would have been adequate, and a heck of a lot cheaper. You don't need machining tolerances to squish a packet of grated fruit.
it is so maddening the more i learn about this thing. i had totally forgotten it wasn't even fruit chunks but just juice.
it is so cynical of a product. imagine being the engineer or industrial designer who was motivated to make the world a better place and this is what they work on.
Honestly, it'd be a fun product to engineer.
Building a super robust appliance with almost no budget constraints? I'd take that over having to cost-cut and deal with shoddy quality parts any day of the week.
I also wouldn't make the company any money, but that's above my pay grade!
That machine was probably designed by first timers and was built like it needs to hold a tank.
So many over engineering, everything custom made CNC, super tight tolerances as if it's going to space.
It's not surprising if that thing cost $500+ to manufacture.
They were making nothing on the machine.
All you need is a simple press like a Fruit Press (usually used for oranges).
https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ?si=BlcNXX1mh9U76dIa
This is a guy who bought one and took it apart. In the process he ruthlessly resized the buttholes of the people who sold/marketed these things.
It is actually impressive that the Juicero was designed and produced and sold for the cost of making them.
i always assumed they were trying to rip off people with an expensive subscription service.but that wouldn't make much sense for engineering an expensive machine. maybe you are right. or it was over engineered because they were trying to make juice from bags of fruit and just realized it was really unnecessary but just left the machine as it was.
They had already promised the function and engineered for it. It was designed to crush fruit and vegetables. But the whole thing just wouldn't work with the pouch design so they had to downgrade the pouch to be ready to drink basically.
Then it had been so hyped and funded on kickstarter they released the machine as-is to save face and because of sunk-cost problems.
This is a very common problem for these pipe dreams made by designers that are not engineers. The whole thing is a fascinating joke.
>This is a very common problem for these pipe dreams made by designers that are not engineers. The whole thing is a fascinating joke.
It's either designers coming up with random ideas, or engineers with no material constraints.
Some of the stuff on Kickstarter is incredibly over-engineered with very small tolerances that would be manageable if it was a large production run (like Lego), but not cost effective at the startup scale.
It's most likely new engineers, with clueless management and giving them free reign without budget constraint.
You literally got a school project level product. No optimization, no trying to save costs.
Everything was CNC, tight tolerances and molded for the plastic parts.
The most insane part to me was that the thing isn't even a juicer. It doesn't juice things, it just presses on a pouch that already contains shredded fruit pulp/juice.
Like, there is zero reason for it to even exist in the first place, as the title points out - you can just squeeze the pouch yourself and achieve exactly the same result!
And you had to buy the juice packs from the company at $5-8 each, and the Juicero would scan the pack’s QR code to see if it was an official Juicero brand juice pack. If it wasn’t, then it would refuse to juice it.
DRM on this stuff is so silly.
I remember the Keurig controversy where it had to be a genuine one of their pods and there were all sorts of "hack" videos where they'd just tape a used one for the sensor to read.
In the words of Cr1tikal, “That’s what I want, a machine that can tell me ‘no’ when I tell it what to do.”
I didn’t know about the Keurig hack with the used pods but that’s hilarious 😂
>Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where ~~such orders would conflict with the First Law.~~ we haven't gotten a cut
It was also, in this case, just so wildly aspirational. Like, they expected their machine to do so well that it would make sense for people to make fake juice packets for it? Come on.
(The reality is that it was probably more of a "solution looking for a problem" thing where they wanted it to have wifi as a core feature to sell it to investors, but were then left with the question of what possible use wifi could have on a juicer. Or packet-squeezer, I guess.)
This. It’s why gym treadmills cost $7-$8k but you can buy one for home on amazon for $500. The gym treadmills need to be capable of running all day every day at every speed imaginable.
> Yes, the cheaper machine would likely have half the lifespan of the Juicero, but that lifespan would probably still be measured in years if not decades.
One of the biggest costs was they decided to apply EVEN pressure across the whole pouch. To do this they needed like 700 pounds (made up number, I can't remember the actual one) of force... But if you just squeezed part of the pouch you could decrease that number significantly. Like you do when using your hands. Or a roller. The cost could have been decreased by over half if they used a roller instead of a flat press. And it wouldn't have even effected the *build quality* so the lifetime would have been just as long, *if not longer due to the reduced stress*.
tl;dr it wasn't only over-engineered. Half the cost was also due to a poor design decision that wouldn't effect build quality at all.
I continue to be utterly amazed with the $20 store brand coffee machines from Walmart.
It's too stupid to die. More expensive ones often have a big water reservoir that just gets stagnant and weird if you don't drink enough coffee. The material it is made of doesn't taste like plastic and resists all known forms of attack. Expensive cleaning solution? The manual says to brew a couple of cups of white vinegar every few months, although you could just hurl it into the sun and buy a new one for $20. It has two buttons, no wifi, and is perfectly engineered to make one cup of coffee for one guy in the morning.
Or you could spend $4k for very slightly more automation.
Well, braking is also accelerating, but if you launch straight up from the surface of the Earth with 30 km/s of delta v, in a direction retrograde to Earth's orbit around the Sun, then you'll hit the Sun without ever changing the direction of your thrust. I guess you could consider all of that braking, though.
> It has two buttons, no wifi, and is perfectly engineered to make one cup of coffee for one guy in the morning.
I got a king-size plastic mesh tea infuser for $9.
I stick it in my coffee mug, add coffee, pour over hot water and let steep for a few mins before pulling the infuser out.
It's basically a french press but way less annoying to use.
The founder of juicero went on to sell "raw water" at whole foods which was water collected from a spring with no treatment.
You can drink spring water okay so long as it's emerging directly from a rock face with no indication of contamination.
His bottled raw water was scooped out of a small spring where gawd knows how much bird and animal shit fell into it. Recipe for giardia.
It’s a food processor that costs over $1000 that can be beat to shit by the lowest common denominator and keep on chugging. A staple in every restaurant that’s worth something.
>A simpler and cheaper implementation, suggested Einstein, would likely have produced much the same quality of juice at a price several hundred dollars cheaper
#Doesn't take an Einstein to figure that out
If you have an extra 40 minutes, take a look at this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
He breaks the machine down and basically says the build quality is off the charts ridiculous. Of course at $699 for a thing that squeezes a juice packet it should be...
Yeah it’s Ave, and I think he started to go off the rails before covid. Read a comment I laughter at, “when your favorite YouTuber gets a cnc machine it’s over”
Wasn't it when his ex wife came out as bisexual and got together with another woman? I remember him mentioning that in one of the last videos I watched, before he fell of his rocker completely
I unsubscribed when he started posting those rambling fireside chat videos. They were so strange and unhinged that it felt like a friend or loved one should have been checking in on him.
Holy crap I remember watching this vid—first time I came across the phrase, “what makes the pixies dance”.
The guy knows so much about every aspect of the build that I’ve never felt dumber while listening to someone so coarse..
Oh my god, I’m 24 minutes in and it’s the best 24 minutes of YouTube I’ve watched in a while. He opens the box with an axe and the video surprisingly does not drop in quality from there. I’ve learned more in 24 minutes about machines from a guy who says “mastication” like a fourteen year old who just learned the word than I think I would in an entire semester of electrical engineering school.
A commenter on the video is saying his dad was one of the engineers behind the machine, and the team supposedly went crazy with it to teach them a lesson. Sounds a little dubious but funny if true.
This is actually really funny, I wonder what they were thinking. It looks like pre-pressed juice in a bag so buy the machine to press the juice out for you? Why not just bottled the juice and sell it instead. Weird all-around
A comment there points out its not even a big person doing the squeezing, it's like they got the tiniest woman in the office with hands like a child and were like "Go, beat this $700 machine that does nothing but squeeze a juice packet".
I don’t think the fact that the packs can be squeezed by hand is even the most egregious part. It’s the very premise of a juicer that can’t juice fresh juice. Literally what is even the point of a juicer if you can’t buy fresh fruit and vegetables to juice? Just buy bottled juice then?
They started with a Kickstarter and the unique selling point was that this juicer would crush the fruit with pressure rather than blend it up with something sharp. Assumedly that would be healthier for some reason.
It turns out it's actually very hard to crush carrots and things like that. As they actually had to build the thing they had to make all sorts of compromises to make it actually function at all.
> crush the fruit with pressure rather than blend it up with something sharp. Assumedly that would be healthier for some reason
In theory, blender does cut some of longer plant fibres to shorter carbohydrates, which increases their perceived sweetness and human digestible energy content. Pressing between two smooth surfaces only breaks 3 dimensional macro structures. In practice, the difference is most likely meaningless, as there will be breaking off from edges of these broken 3D structures, and blender blade is as likely to push off than cut something size of free fibre molecule.
Most likely the difference is in clarity of the juice, blending will lead to having more small solid free particles in the juice (because blades cut up the larger particles), so it is harder to filter to get clear look. Solid particles from pressing are generally larger or have loose connections left from fruit cell structure, so they are easier to filter. But then juicero juices in adds were mostly "smoothie" like in consistency, so I guess they were not trying to get that clear look.
I'm certain it must have started life out differently, like they were planning on making an actual juicer, and added the idea of providing produce to juice, and during development they realized it would be cheaper to just provide pre-juiced juice.
If they sold shelf stable pods of powdered juice and you ended up with fresh juice at the push of a button then maybe it would have a bit more merit lol.
This is exactly what happened. The founder had started a successful juicebar and wanted to revolutionize the world with his perfect juice recipes. He just couldn’t figure out how to do it on a small in-home level.
Revolutionize the world? or scam VCs? He raised 118m for that stupid idea. The free money era was full of really well funded dumb ideas because capital was flying around willy nilly and I'm almost sure a lot of them were never actually making a sincere effort, just shaking down the investors for paychecks.
iirc part of the reason it's so over engineered is it was meant to do more intense juicing like squeezing whole fruit, but it wasn't going to work so they changed to pouches which made the machine superfluous
Distrup= a mostly white version of an existing product with some strips of the companys logo color, with mandatory internet connectivity and shitty app.
Like seriously almost all techbro "inventions" are just white plastic with bit of the logo color on them
They wouldn't let you juice from the (very expensive) packet sold by them if it had already reached the expiry date. Good in theory, but had like incredibly short shelf life like a week or something.
you laugh now but this is how all modern appliances are becoming
Why does my garmin need access to the web to sync with my phone?
Why do wifi kettles exist?
Why does my dishwasher need wifi?
Fair, though if you were paying attention to the tech world at all it was ridiculed from the very beginning, quickly a symbol of everything ludicrous about the 2010s tech industry
I feel like half the Reddit community is 6 or under. Either that or they have the attention span of a gnat. This was international headlines for a hot minute because it was so absurd.
The young people think everything is new, I’m learning. I recently saw a post where a 24yo was shocked that people liking Eminem wasn’t a meme. Not enough curiosity to even Google it and just immediately post their ignorance on social media.
The whole thing was a massive shit show scam. The juice packets had a very short shelf life of an of about a week and if I remember right sometimes they weren’t even good when you got them. And if they were out of date, the machine wouldn’t work, come on we all know most foods are perfectly fine a few days past the date. From what I’ve read, the machines were rather well-made, and if they had served almost any other purpose, they would’ve been great, but in this case, you can get the same amount of juice out with your bare hands. Because it wasn’t just a bunch of cut up pieces of fruit and vegetables, it was already goddamn juice.
A bad design well made. The "packets can be juiced by hand" part says a lot. The machine didn't need to be particularly powerful but the thing was marketed on how evenly it applied pressure and so they used an unsuitable mechanism. Good for someone who wants a compact, relatively high power, press. Not really good at juice actually.
The juicero thing was a complete scam. It was just pre-squeezed juice in plastic bags, with some fancy bullshit marketing. It was a stupid concept and deserved to die.
the way this device reads is more like a list of buzzwords for raising VC money around that time. Wi-Fi acted, QR code reading, IoC, almost guaranteed security with usage (except for people realizing that you can probably just open the darn packages themselves and do everything the machine could), probable subscription based high priced items and health related to top it all off. would've loved reading the "about us" page with the story about the founder. no doubt it probably involved him just jogging along some path then going, "I need juice" or something like that leads to some epiphany of buzzword soup to scam out some sucker investors. that right there is your issue with silicon valley unicorn culture. except this guy even managed to find manufacturing for all this.
Well shit, *now* where am I supposed to get my needlessly complicated and inconvenient juice fix? I guess I'll have to go back to drinking juice off a precariously ballenced plate with my hands tied behind my back while blindfolded and riding a camel through a ball pit at the summit of Mount Rainier
That’s ridiculous. What rubes they were back then.
But listen have a great idea. JuiceroAI. It’s built with integrated AI to make the juicing experience seamless. Only $1,699 a piece. I can let you in on the ground floor for a mere $1,000,000 investment.
I thought and still do genuinely think this was done kind of joke or performance piece. There's no way anybody would consider spending that much on a juicer outside of the weird novelty.
Juicero was nothing but an investor scam. And the SF VCs just heard "coffepods, but juice, and also subscription" and creamed their pants.
Insane that they managed to raise those amounts of capital for something this dumb 😂.
The first version of the machine they built was insanely over engineered and cost a fortune to manufacture for no good reason.
not only were the packs easily squeezable by hand, *they were basically just the final juice product in a pouch*
motherfuckers were buying robo-Capri-Sun
[AvE's teardown is highly recommended.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ)
The engineers they got to make this thing must have had an absolute blast. They overbuilt the everloving shit out of it.
It's whisper quiet!
You mean there’s a better way?
Juice Loosener would have been a perfect name for this device, too
You got all that from one bag of oranges?!
It comes with a sun tan lotion 🧴
That's also a laxative!
And I bet the Juicero doesn't come with sunscreen that is also a laxative.
This was bad enough but the founder/CEO Doug Evans moved on the push “Raw Water” https://www.myrecipes.com/extracrispy/the-founder-of-juicero-is-now-shilling-for-a-fearmongering-raw-water-brand and is now onto sprouts as a healthy lifestyle superfood that does everything. He is a charismatic huckster that people still want to believe.
Raw Water is the most braindead "movement" I have ever heard of, but it at least weeds out the idiots I guess lol
Raw sewage water is as raw as it can get. Pure unfiltered, prebiotic, probiotic, necrotic and everything in between
Personally, I love the way the brain eating amoebas tickle my nose!
That tickle let’s you know the raw water is working!
Wow! Say, *coughing* does it come in other flavors!?
Mine *hack* tastes like metal!
RFK jr confirmed.
“When I was a little boy in New York City in the 1940s, we swam in the Hudson River and it was filled with raw sewage okay? We swam in raw sewage! You know... to cool off! And at that time, the big fear was polio; thousands of kids died from polio every year but you know something? In my neighbourhood, no one ever got polio! No one! Ever! You know why? Cause we swam in raw sewage! It strengthened our immune systems! The polio never had a prayer; we were tempered in raw shit! So personally, I never take any special precautions against germs. I don't shy away from people that sneeze and cough, I don't wipe off the telephone, I don't cover the toilet seat, and if I drop food on the floor, I pick it up and eat it! Yes I do. Even if I'm at a sidewalk café! In Calcutta! The poor section! On New Year's morning during a soccer riot! And you know something? In spite of all that so-called risky behaviour, I never get infections, I don't get them, I don't get colds, I don't get flu, I don't get headaches, I don't get upset stomach, you know why? Cause I got a good strong immune system and it gets a lot of practice. My immune system is equipped with the biological equivalent of fully automatic military assault rifles with night vision and laser scopes, and we have recently acquired phosphorous grenades, cluster bombs, and anti-personnel fragmentation mines. So when my white blood cells are on patrol recon ordering my blood stream seeking out strangers and other undesirables, if they see any, ANY suspicious looking germs of any kind, they don't fuck around! They whip out their weapons; they wax the motherfucker and deposit the unlucky fellow directly into my colon! Into my colon! There's no nonsense, there's no Miranda warning, there's none of that “three strikes and you're out” shit, first defense, BAM... into the colon you go! And speaking of my colon, I want you to know I don't automatically wash my hands every time I go to the bathroom okay? Can you deal with that? Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. You know when I wash my hands? When I shit on them! That's the only time. And you know how often that happens? Tops, TOPS, 2-3 times a week tops! Maybe a little more frequently over the holidays, you know what I mean? And I'll tell you something else my well-scrubbed friends... you don't need to always need to shower every day, did you know that? It's overkill, unless you work out or work outdoors, or for some reason come in intimate contact with huge amounts of filth and garbage every day, you don't always need to shower. All you really need to do is to wash the four key areas; armpits, asshole, crotch, and teeth. Got that? Armpits, asshole, crotch, and teeth. In fact, you can save yourself a whole lot of time if you simply use the same brush on all four areas!” —George Carlin
Did anyone else read this with Trumps voice before they realised it was George Carlin?
Fun fact: You can read literally anything said by Donald Trump in Zapp Brannigan's voice and it works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA8vQorhAE0
I saw an ad for hydrogen water yesterday. Hydrogen. Water.
Pff, I'm not buying unless you at least throw in some oxygen too.
>Chloramine, and on top of that they’re putting in fluoride. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it’s a mind-control drug that has no benefit to our dental health.” OK, your a conspiracy theorist. This is why our policitcs is the way it is lol
This person votes
"Mandrake, have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water?" It's sad how 60 years on, the John Birch Society nutbags are still a thing
I see him around Venice, California from time to time. Every girl knows he’s a creepy, creepy dude. If he was slightly more popular pretty sure he’d be in jail by now.
As yes, only the most vegan and organic cholera for me!
But is the Giardia ethically sourced?
"unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized spring water, also referred to as “raw water.” Hu? That's ... just what we call "[mineral water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_water)" or "spring water" ? What exactly is there to "push"?
Push up the price
Ah yes, I missed the obvious again, thank you. :)
Mineral water can be and often is filtrated, treated to remove iron, manganese, sulfur and/or arsenic, and sterilized with ozone though. Not saying those are bad things to do, many mineral springs would be unusable without it as they often contain significant amounts of sulfur (not dangerous, but causing a bad taste) and excess iron (makes the water murky brown). But it does mean that mineral water isn't necessarily the same as "raw water".
So they treat mineral water by removing all the minerals? Fuck big water, If I paid for minerals I want an entire unadulterated periodic table with every sip!
Go to bath in england. You can drink the spring water there. You may want to reconsider your position afterwards.
Why would I drink English bath water when there’s perfectly good bath water in my own home??!?
Good you didnt say anything about filtering the radium. It gives my mineral water the kick people crave.
A guy who makes his money off of scams and has lived his entire life in a developed country shilling untreated water because of a conspiracy theory? If god was real this man would've smothered in his cradle.
I would hope he goes to India where he can partake of the raw water from the Ganges River, that might change his mind.
Changed his mind? He's a scammer. Why would you think he believed his own scam?
if id live next to their water source i would personally shit in their water source every day until they understand that modern water treatment is probably one of the best and most livesaving invention ever...
Let’s face it though, the people peddling the snake oil are never the ones who actually use it
What kind of sprouts? Brussels? Because in that case I'm down thems is delicious
Mung beans. I know a guy who grows them at work. Very distinct smell.
The WiFi and overall concept were stupid. But the machine itself was also stupidly expensive in part because they overengineered the shit out of it. >venture capitalist Ben Einstein considered the press to be "an incredibly complicated piece of engineering", but that the complexity was unnecessary and likely arose from a lack of cost constraints during the design process. It was described as being built to the specifications of commercial foodservice equipment, meant for heavy daily use, rather than a consumer appliance. A simpler and cheaper implementation, suggested Einstein, would likely have produced much the same quality of juice at a price several hundred dollars cheaper. Yes, the cheaper machine would likely have half the lifespan of the Juicero, but that lifespan would probably still be measured in years if not decades. Same reason my food processor at home costs a quarter, probably less, than the Robot Coupe I use at work. It doesn't need to be engineered to run for hours of use every day when I use it for twenty minutes a week.
i watched a teardown video if i remember the parts that press the packet was machined from solid chunks of aluminum which is insane. i wonder if a few chunks of wood and some acme threaded steel rod would work just as well
Considering people's hands worked just fine...I'm gonna go with yes. Also, if it's just squeezing packs, is it really a juicer? Or is it just a fancy juice package opener?
That was the scandal. They made it sound like you were inserting packages that contained fresh fruits and veggies and the machine's incredible strength made it all possible. That's why you had to have the QR codes and pre-packaged containers, otherwise it wouldn't be "safe" in the hands of just any old idiot meemaw with a carrot. And then journalists discovered, no, it was just prepackaged juice that was squeezed out, so there was a bit of deception at the heart.
From what I remember it was essentially a bag of fruit pulp, so it was sort of juicing but most of the work had been done already.
They were probably buying pulp cheaply as waste from actual juice manufacturers like Tropicana
Nope, that was actually one of the problems. They were doing everything by hand as stupidly expensive as possible.
Yeah, and from what I remember, big part of the QR system was to really enforce expiration dates, because the juice was unpasteurized, and during development, an unpasteurized juice (Naked?) got a bunch of people sick.
So, it's even more stupid than it sounds. At first glance, it really does feel like a scam where they lock you in to their ridiculously expansive system of pre-packed fruits, and then they sell you the cheapest juice possible to squeeze the most money out of you. But nah, they made an expansive, over-engineered bag squeezer, and then they made the most unoptimized "pulp in a bag" system, so they weren't even scamming people with their disastrous product. Wow.
They scammed themselves. It genuinely seems like they were trying to make a consumer friendly product but built the entire system on the stupidest fucking idea ever.
It's basically a case of "this can all be adequately and truthfully explained by stupidity", in that case the stupidity of thinking so hard it turned a very simple process into something needlessly complicated.
It also *radically* reduced the market range for shipping, because with a shelf life of (I think) 5 days, that would absolutely kneecap how far it could be shipped
"We'll just build a second factory. I'll begin hiring artisans to design the bricks from scratch."
I do remember it was fun to make memes about the bags having Juice DRM.
>an unpasteurized juice (Naked?) It was Odwalla. E. coli contaminated apple juice. These weirdos are really afraid of warming things up to kill bacteria.
I'm a microbiologist and a firm believer of pasturization. I don't think anything "raw" has any real health benefit except maybe some specific niche cases. With that said, pasturization can affect the flavour of things, especially fuits and fruit juices. The point of a juicer is fresh juice, so I would be very disappointed if the packages were pasturized because it absolutely would affect the flavour which ignoring all the health BS is the main point of freshly squeezed juice. The only other workable method is ultrafiltration but that doesn't work for many fruit juices because it would remove the pulp and solids, and it certainly wouldn't work in this case which was packages of pulp. In my opinion, their best bet would have to be storing and shipping them frozen. None of this however eliminates the danger of contaminated source material which necessitates very strict QC of incoming fruit and plant sanitization. Plenty of food born pathogens come from farm side contamination and don't really need time to grow in the processed food. Expiration dates in those cases really don't matter.
“Yes our product does press juice out of the bags” “But does it juice the fruit or is it just squeezing juice out of the bags” “Next question”
"The fruit fell off."
Cardboard and Cardboard derivatives are out.
And the juice crew requirements?
One pair of hands, I suppose.
IT WEEZES THE JO OOOOSE
DON'T BE WEEZING THE JUICE!
Yeah and it was just extremely wasteful overall... I mean, if they had built a machine where you could just toss fruit into it and it would do the whole process of washing, skinning, coring, squeezing, that would've been quite a trick...and much more environmentally responsible.
for a single typeof fruit thats doable but i dont think that it would be feasable to build a machine that cam do it for for example bananas apples and oranges at the same time givem the fact that they have wildly different shapes and the peeling and preperation process is different
Jack Lalanne solved that shit in the 90s
Can a banana be juiced?
I know a girl, just give her 5 bucks
Makes a good smoothie at least.
That doesn't even sound impossible, just difficult. I kind of want to give it a go now.
There's already equipment that peels, cores, and slices apples all in one go..... they've been around since the 1800s.
I feel like I’m crazy consumer grade juicing machines already exist and it’s so much simpler than your ideas. You don’t need to peel or core fruit to juice it.
We had one that shredded the fruit and centrifuged the juice out. If I remember correctly it had a shredding blade at the bottom (like a circular cheese grater) and like a rotating sieve around. You would put the fruit chunks into a hole and push it down with a piece that fit that hole, and the machine would destroy pretty much anything. It was pretty tall and wide, probably due to the motor. It could deal with anything you could make fit the hole, and the only reason to remove anything from the fruit was if you didn't want the taste. So many intrusive thoughts about sticking a finger in there, I was too young for the other intrusive thought.
I still have my family's one. Made in commie times, the motor still works, the plastic looks a bit worse for wear. It gets out of the cupboard one or two times a year at most, when I remember I have it.
They already have bread machines that automate all the steps of making bread
Don’t give Elizabeth Holmes any ideas
This really sounds like a managerial coordination issue. Like, originally it probably was supposed to be some sort of cold press juicing machine that did press fresh fruit - which would explain why it's engineered by such strong materials. It feels like the supply chain guys probably didn't realise how expensive transporting fresh fruit is, or how difficult and then got to the point where they ran into the truth that actually the real expensive part of fresh fruit is picking and shipping it all in one piece, and that if you just crush it into a pulp before you ship it, and pop it into a sealed bag, it ships much better. But now you're too deep in and you've already told all the investors that everyone needs your expensive press in their homes.
Below comment is slightly incorrect, it was sort of a pre-grated/diced 'pulp' that came in the packs. Not pure liquid or juice, there was still actual 'juicing' going on, just not a lot (definitely not, like, an otherwise pristine apple and head of broccoli or whatever).
it is in fact not a juicer since you can't put any actual fruits or vegetables into the machine it just squeezes capri suns into a cup for you without making a mess anyways that'll be 420 dollars
>i watched a teardown video if i remember the parts that press the packet was machined from solid chunks of aluminum which is insane. It was machined high quality aluminium, big metal screw for the press, machined out custom aluminum struts, 3" tapered roller bearing, custom machined gears, custom fancy rubber seals, expensive plastics, massive overpowered motor(actually multiple motors), custom sensors, etc. The guidance pins literally form an air cushion as you push them in, because of the tight machining tolerances. They basically threw money at the engineers. They were selling it at a huge loss and banking on the subscription service. EDIT [AvE teardown](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ)
Even just cast aluminium would have been adequate, and a heck of a lot cheaper. You don't need machining tolerances to squish a packet of grated fruit.
it is so maddening the more i learn about this thing. i had totally forgotten it wasn't even fruit chunks but just juice. it is so cynical of a product. imagine being the engineer or industrial designer who was motivated to make the world a better place and this is what they work on.
Honestly, it'd be a fun product to engineer. Building a super robust appliance with almost no budget constraints? I'd take that over having to cost-cut and deal with shoddy quality parts any day of the week. I also wouldn't make the company any money, but that's above my pay grade!
Seriously, I could make one that would still be happily squeezing juice pouches after getting nuked. So long as you got the WiFi working again.
Plastic that is like an half inch thick with a cheap stamped sheet metal backing to distribute stresses would have been fine.
That machine was probably designed by first timers and was built like it needs to hold a tank. So many over engineering, everything custom made CNC, super tight tolerances as if it's going to space. It's not surprising if that thing cost $500+ to manufacture. They were making nothing on the machine. All you need is a simple press like a Fruit Press (usually used for oranges).
They should have used REAL HUMAN HANDS.
https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ?si=BlcNXX1mh9U76dIa This is a guy who bought one and took it apart. In the process he ruthlessly resized the buttholes of the people who sold/marketed these things. It is actually impressive that the Juicero was designed and produced and sold for the cost of making them.
Came here for the AvE teardown, was not disappointed
One of my favourite channels, I wish he did more teardowns again but on the other hand, there’s only so many drills being made nowadays.
That just sounds like they wanted to drive up the price. Using solid chunks of aluminum is some high end engineering shit.
i always assumed they were trying to rip off people with an expensive subscription service.but that wouldn't make much sense for engineering an expensive machine. maybe you are right. or it was over engineered because they were trying to make juice from bags of fruit and just realized it was really unnecessary but just left the machine as it was.
Listening to this story on a podcast, the dude behind it was just mental.
the juice is loose
$1000 exotic wood stereo tuning knobs have entered the chat
They had already promised the function and engineered for it. It was designed to crush fruit and vegetables. But the whole thing just wouldn't work with the pouch design so they had to downgrade the pouch to be ready to drink basically. Then it had been so hyped and funded on kickstarter they released the machine as-is to save face and because of sunk-cost problems. This is a very common problem for these pipe dreams made by designers that are not engineers. The whole thing is a fascinating joke.
>This is a very common problem for these pipe dreams made by designers that are not engineers. The whole thing is a fascinating joke. It's either designers coming up with random ideas, or engineers with no material constraints. Some of the stuff on Kickstarter is incredibly over-engineered with very small tolerances that would be manageable if it was a large production run (like Lego), but not cost effective at the startup scale.
It's most likely new engineers, with clueless management and giving them free reign without budget constraint. You literally got a school project level product. No optimization, no trying to save costs. Everything was CNC, tight tolerances and molded for the plastic parts.
Must be on AvE channel, this one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ&pp=ygUKYXZlIGp1aWNlcg%3D%3D
The most insane part to me was that the thing isn't even a juicer. It doesn't juice things, it just presses on a pouch that already contains shredded fruit pulp/juice. Like, there is zero reason for it to even exist in the first place, as the title points out - you can just squeeze the pouch yourself and achieve exactly the same result!
And you had to buy the juice packs from the company at $5-8 each, and the Juicero would scan the pack’s QR code to see if it was an official Juicero brand juice pack. If it wasn’t, then it would refuse to juice it.
DRM on this stuff is so silly. I remember the Keurig controversy where it had to be a genuine one of their pods and there were all sorts of "hack" videos where they'd just tape a used one for the sensor to read.
In the words of Cr1tikal, “That’s what I want, a machine that can tell me ‘no’ when I tell it what to do.” I didn’t know about the Keurig hack with the used pods but that’s hilarious 😂
>Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where ~~such orders would conflict with the First Law.~~ we haven't gotten a cut
You don't even want to think about what this things would do with the "Zeroeth law"
"Computer says no."
I am now telling the computer *exactly* what it can do with a lifetime supply of chocolates
It was also, in this case, just so wildly aspirational. Like, they expected their machine to do so well that it would make sense for people to make fake juice packets for it? Come on. (The reality is that it was probably more of a "solution looking for a problem" thing where they wanted it to have wifi as a core feature to sell it to investors, but were then left with the question of what possible use wifi could have on a juicer. Or packet-squeezer, I guess.)
Apparently, the fruit packs were only sold as part of a subscription because of course they were.
It also wouldn't juice if the pack was expired by even a moment.
This. It’s why gym treadmills cost $7-$8k but you can buy one for home on amazon for $500. The gym treadmills need to be capable of running all day every day at every speed imaginable.
Whereas a home treadmill only needs to be able to support the weight of 3-5 items of clothing.
Where the hell are people getting a decent treadmill for 500 lol
Facebook marketplace in February
But seriously, Aftermarket.
It's like 300 for a good one these days
> Yes, the cheaper machine would likely have half the lifespan of the Juicero, but that lifespan would probably still be measured in years if not decades. One of the biggest costs was they decided to apply EVEN pressure across the whole pouch. To do this they needed like 700 pounds (made up number, I can't remember the actual one) of force... But if you just squeezed part of the pouch you could decrease that number significantly. Like you do when using your hands. Or a roller. The cost could have been decreased by over half if they used a roller instead of a flat press. And it wouldn't have even effected the *build quality* so the lifetime would have been just as long, *if not longer due to the reduced stress*. tl;dr it wasn't only over-engineered. Half the cost was also due to a poor design decision that wouldn't effect build quality at all.
I continue to be utterly amazed with the $20 store brand coffee machines from Walmart. It's too stupid to die. More expensive ones often have a big water reservoir that just gets stagnant and weird if you don't drink enough coffee. The material it is made of doesn't taste like plastic and resists all known forms of attack. Expensive cleaning solution? The manual says to brew a couple of cups of white vinegar every few months, although you could just hurl it into the sun and buy a new one for $20. It has two buttons, no wifi, and is perfectly engineered to make one cup of coffee for one guy in the morning. Or you could spend $4k for very slightly more automation.
Tell me more about this "hurl it into the sun" solution
Apply delta-v to your problems and you'll never have to clean an appliance again
To get it out of the surface and orbit you need to accelerate, but to get it into the Sun you actually need to brake.
Well, braking is also accelerating, but if you launch straight up from the surface of the Earth with 30 km/s of delta v, in a direction retrograde to Earth's orbit around the Sun, then you'll hit the Sun without ever changing the direction of your thrust. I guess you could consider all of that braking, though.
> It has two buttons, no wifi, and is perfectly engineered to make one cup of coffee for one guy in the morning. I got a king-size plastic mesh tea infuser for $9. I stick it in my coffee mug, add coffee, pour over hot water and let steep for a few mins before pulling the infuser out. It's basically a french press but way less annoying to use.
The founder of juicero went on to sell "raw water" at whole foods which was water collected from a spring with no treatment. You can drink spring water okay so long as it's emerging directly from a rock face with no indication of contamination. His bottled raw water was scooped out of a small spring where gawd knows how much bird and animal shit fell into it. Recipe for giardia.
Bit of a clockwork orange juicer…
Every time I see the shitty robot coupe at my work I think about that post of the guy that got given one by his uncle that was still in the box.
What's a robot coupe and why isn't it a car?
It’s a food processor that costs over $1000 that can be beat to shit by the lowest common denominator and keep on chugging. A staple in every restaurant that’s worth something.
>A simpler and cheaper implementation, suggested Einstein, would likely have produced much the same quality of juice at a price several hundred dollars cheaper #Doesn't take an Einstein to figure that out
If you have an extra 40 minutes, take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ He breaks the machine down and basically says the build quality is off the charts ridiculous. Of course at $699 for a thing that squeezes a juice packet it should be...
The guy opened the box with an axe. Subscribed
His channel died years ago. Went off the rails. Was amazing back in the day tho.
Didn't click on the link but it's AvE isn't it? Shame covid got to him
Yeah it’s Ave, and I think he started to go off the rails before covid. Read a comment I laughter at, “when your favorite YouTuber gets a cnc machine it’s over”
No youtube channel can stay on top forever.
Wasn't it when his ex wife came out as bisexual and got together with another woman? I remember him mentioning that in one of the last videos I watched, before he fell of his rocker completely
That must have been someone else. He never mentioned an ex-wife
Its impossible to tell what was just acting weird character for videos and what was real.
Really was. He kinda broke my heart there. Keep your dick in a vice
his dick got stuck in the vice :(
I just watched his latest video (2 months ago). Seems to be about climate change and WD-40 or something.
Yeah, I unsubscribed when he started including right wing politics in his videos.
I unsubscribed when he started posting those rambling fireside chat videos. They were so strange and unhinged that it felt like a friend or loved one should have been checking in on him.
Just with this description I can tell it's AvE, without even clicking the link.
If I recall it was also sold at a loss, so the machine was actually stupid expensive, it’s just 699 was what they thought they could get away with.
Yeah, parts alone were estimated to be about $750 by 3rd parties. All for a bag that you could literally squeeze with your hands for the same effect.
You mean it's skookum
Holy crap I remember watching this vid—first time I came across the phrase, “what makes the pixies dance”. The guy knows so much about every aspect of the build that I’ve never felt dumber while listening to someone so coarse..
Oh my god, I’m 24 minutes in and it’s the best 24 minutes of YouTube I’ve watched in a while. He opens the box with an axe and the video surprisingly does not drop in quality from there. I’ve learned more in 24 minutes about machines from a guy who says “mastication” like a fourteen year old who just learned the word than I think I would in an entire semester of electrical engineering school.
Dude was very entertaining but went off the rails a few years back. The videos were never the same.
Ah yes. I knew this was AvE before I even opened the link. One of my favorite channels on YouTube
This is one if my favorite channels. I've started calling electricity pixies because of it
Its angry pixies
A commenter on the video is saying his dad was one of the engineers behind the machine, and the team supposedly went crazy with it to teach them a lesson. Sounds a little dubious but funny if true.
if only HP/Epson/Canon scooped up those engineers to solve printers. there's a niche market for $2000+ consumer printers
The [Bloomberg](https://youtu.be/5lutHF5HhVA) video really showed the absurdity of it all.
This video was quite viral I think, kind of like final nail in the coffin.
This is actually really funny, I wonder what they were thinking. It looks like pre-pressed juice in a bag so buy the machine to press the juice out for you? Why not just bottled the juice and sell it instead. Weird all-around
A comment there points out its not even a big person doing the squeezing, it's like they got the tiniest woman in the office with hands like a child and were like "Go, beat this $700 machine that does nothing but squeeze a juice packet".
I don’t think the fact that the packs can be squeezed by hand is even the most egregious part. It’s the very premise of a juicer that can’t juice fresh juice. Literally what is even the point of a juicer if you can’t buy fresh fruit and vegetables to juice? Just buy bottled juice then?
They started with a Kickstarter and the unique selling point was that this juicer would crush the fruit with pressure rather than blend it up with something sharp. Assumedly that would be healthier for some reason. It turns out it's actually very hard to crush carrots and things like that. As they actually had to build the thing they had to make all sorts of compromises to make it actually function at all.
> crush the fruit with pressure rather than blend it up with something sharp. Assumedly that would be healthier for some reason In theory, blender does cut some of longer plant fibres to shorter carbohydrates, which increases their perceived sweetness and human digestible energy content. Pressing between two smooth surfaces only breaks 3 dimensional macro structures. In practice, the difference is most likely meaningless, as there will be breaking off from edges of these broken 3D structures, and blender blade is as likely to push off than cut something size of free fibre molecule. Most likely the difference is in clarity of the juice, blending will lead to having more small solid free particles in the juice (because blades cut up the larger particles), so it is harder to filter to get clear look. Solid particles from pressing are generally larger or have loose connections left from fruit cell structure, so they are easier to filter. But then juicero juices in adds were mostly "smoothie" like in consistency, so I guess they were not trying to get that clear look.
I'm certain it must have started life out differently, like they were planning on making an actual juicer, and added the idea of providing produce to juice, and during development they realized it would be cheaper to just provide pre-juiced juice.
Was just some asshole trying to make the Keurig for juice but that's fundamentally a dumb idea.
If they sold shelf stable pods of powdered juice and you ended up with fresh juice at the push of a button then maybe it would have a bit more merit lol.
This is exactly what happened. The founder had started a successful juicebar and wanted to revolutionize the world with his perfect juice recipes. He just couldn’t figure out how to do it on a small in-home level.
Revolutionize the world? or scam VCs? He raised 118m for that stupid idea. The free money era was full of really well funded dumb ideas because capital was flying around willy nilly and I'm almost sure a lot of them were never actually making a sincere effort, just shaking down the investors for paychecks.
iirc part of the reason it's so over engineered is it was meant to do more intense juicing like squeezing whole fruit, but it wasn't going to work so they changed to pouches which made the machine superfluous
“No ones disrupting Juice!! Lets goooooooo” - techbros
There's no sector they won't jump into if they see a non-problem they can not solve for a lot of money. Its admirable really.
Disrupt=crappy version of an existing product with an app and a subscription.
Distrup= a mostly white version of an existing product with some strips of the companys logo color, with mandatory internet connectivity and shitty app. Like seriously almost all techbro "inventions" are just white plastic with bit of the logo color on them
"I want a quick drink of juice" "I can't, need firmware update. Please connect your wifi" "Why the fuck juicer need firmware?"
They wouldn't let you juice from the (very expensive) packet sold by them if it had already reached the expiry date. Good in theory, but had like incredibly short shelf life like a week or something.
I think that's bad in theory
you laugh now but this is how all modern appliances are becoming Why does my garmin need access to the web to sync with my phone? Why do wifi kettles exist? Why does my dishwasher need wifi?
Calling it juicer is generous. It's a package squeezer.
This was only 7 years ago…
It was a minor enough blip that plenty of people didn't hear about it when it was a thing.
Fair, though if you were paying attention to the tech world at all it was ridiculed from the very beginning, quickly a symbol of everything ludicrous about the 2010s tech industry
One of my friends gave a talk at their old school and I made them use it as an example of “the best product with no market is a bad product”
It's funny, I remember the video exposing this going viral on /r/videos. 7 years later and now it's on TIL.
I feel like half the Reddit community is 6 or under. Either that or they have the attention span of a gnat. This was international headlines for a hot minute because it was so absurd.
The young people think everything is new, I’m learning. I recently saw a post where a 24yo was shocked that people liking Eminem wasn’t a meme. Not enough curiosity to even Google it and just immediately post their ignorance on social media.
Good episode of the Dollop podcast about this: Doug Evans and Juicero #418
IIRC that was the product that introduced me to r/shittykickstarters
The whole thing was a massive shit show scam. The juice packets had a very short shelf life of an of about a week and if I remember right sometimes they weren’t even good when you got them. And if they were out of date, the machine wouldn’t work, come on we all know most foods are perfectly fine a few days past the date. From what I’ve read, the machines were rather well-made, and if they had served almost any other purpose, they would’ve been great, but in this case, you can get the same amount of juice out with your bare hands. Because it wasn’t just a bunch of cut up pieces of fruit and vegetables, it was already goddamn juice.
I think the whole expiration date thing was because they were unpasteurized which *will* fuck you up past the expiration date.
A bad design well made. The "packets can be juiced by hand" part says a lot. The machine didn't need to be particularly powerful but the thing was marketed on how evenly it applied pressure and so they used an unsuitable mechanism. Good for someone who wants a compact, relatively high power, press. Not really good at juice actually.
The juicero thing was a complete scam. It was just pre-squeezed juice in plastic bags, with some fancy bullshit marketing. It was a stupid concept and deserved to die.
the way this device reads is more like a list of buzzwords for raising VC money around that time. Wi-Fi acted, QR code reading, IoC, almost guaranteed security with usage (except for people realizing that you can probably just open the darn packages themselves and do everything the machine could), probable subscription based high priced items and health related to top it all off. would've loved reading the "about us" page with the story about the founder. no doubt it probably involved him just jogging along some path then going, "I need juice" or something like that leads to some epiphany of buzzword soup to scam out some sucker investors. that right there is your issue with silicon valley unicorn culture. except this guy even managed to find manufacturing for all this.
a zero interest rate phenomenon
Well shit, *now* where am I supposed to get my needlessly complicated and inconvenient juice fix? I guess I'll have to go back to drinking juice off a precariously ballenced plate with my hands tied behind my back while blindfolded and riding a camel through a ball pit at the summit of Mount Rainier
That’s ridiculous. What rubes they were back then. But listen have a great idea. JuiceroAI. It’s built with integrated AI to make the juicing experience seamless. Only $1,699 a piece. I can let you in on the ground floor for a mere $1,000,000 investment.
I thought and still do genuinely think this was done kind of joke or performance piece. There's no way anybody would consider spending that much on a juicer outside of the weird novelty.
Imagine going over to someone’s house and they offer you a drink from their Juicero while they fire up their Ouya
Juicero was nothing but an investor scam. And the SF VCs just heard "coffepods, but juice, and also subscription" and creamed their pants. Insane that they managed to raise those amounts of capital for something this dumb 😂. The first version of the machine they built was insanely over engineered and cost a fortune to manufacture for no good reason.
not only were the packs easily squeezable by hand, *they were basically just the final juice product in a pouch* motherfuckers were buying robo-Capri-Sun
[AvE's teardown is highly recommended.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ) The engineers they got to make this thing must have had an absolute blast. They overbuilt the everloving shit out of it.