Summary
Juicero was a San Francisco startup that sold a Wi-Fi-connected countertop juice press paired with a subscription service of single-serve produce packs. Founded by raw-foods evangelist Doug Evans in 2013, it raised roughly $120 million from blue-chip Silicon Valley investors — including Kleiner Perkins, GV, and Thrive Capital — on the pitch that it was building the “Keurig of juice.”
The company collapsed in 2017 after Bloomberg revealed that the $400 machine wasn’t actually doing anything its customers couldn’t do with their bare hands: the proprietary produce packs could be squeezed out by hand in about the same time, with about the same yield. The product became a global punchline within days, sales evaporated, and the company shut down within five months.
What killed it
Juicero’s pitch was ambitious by design. Doug Evans, a vegan and longtime juice-bar operator, had spent years prototyping a connected press that would crush a proprietary pouch of pre-cut produce into a single glass of cold-pressed juice. The machine launched in March 2016 at $699 (later cut to $399) and required a subscription to Juicero’s perishable produce packs, which the device would refuse to press if a QR code indicated they were past their expiry or had been recalled.
Investors loved it. The company closed a $70 million Series B in March 2016 led by Artis Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, GV (Google Ventures), Thrive Capital, Campbell Soup’s venture arm, and others — bringing total funding to roughly $120 million. Coverage at launch was credulous and admiring; Fortune ran a celebratory profile of Evans the same week the round closed.
The core problem was already visible from the start, though almost nobody pressed on it: the value proposition of a juicer that exclusively pressed pre-portioned, pre-cut, pre-pasteurized produce pouches wasn’t obvious. The pouches did the hard work; the machine just squeezed them. On April 19, 2017, Bloomberg published the exposé that ended the company. Reporters Ellen Huet and Olivia Zaleski had discovered, talking to investors and former employees, that the pouches could be wrung out by hand in about ninety seconds — only marginally slower than the machine, with comparable juice yield. Bloomberg ran video of a reporter doing exactly that.
The story went viral within hours. The image of a Silicon Valley juice-pouch being squeezed by hand into a glass became one of the defining icons of the late-2010s tech-bubble critique. Customers asked for refunds. Press coverage flipped overnight from “ambitious hardware play” to “emblem of venture-capital excess.” Juicero offered full refunds on the press for thirty days as damage control, but the brand was effectively dead.
Underneath the Bloomberg story, the unit economics had never worked. By Bloomberg’s later reporting, the press itself cost roughly $400 to manufacture even after a 2017 redesign — initial units were said to cost closer to $750 — meaning the company was selling its hardware at a loss and trying to make it back on consumable subscriptions, on a customer base that turned out to be tiny. The CEO Evans had been replaced in late 2016 by former Coca-Cola executive Jeff Dunn, who tried to retool the company toward enterprise distribution (offices, hotels), but burn was running at roughly $4 million a month and there was no path to break-even at that volume.
On September 1, 2017, Juicero announced it was suspending sales of the press and pouches and laying off staff while looking for a buyer. No buyer materialized. Operations wound down over the following weeks; assets were eventually sold to a holding company. The startup had gone from a $120 million darling to fire sale in roughly seventeen months from product launch.
The company’s epitaph is unusual in startup post-mortems: it didn’t fail because the market wasn’t ready, or because a competitor outmaneuvered it. It failed because, once anyone looked closely, there wasn’t a real problem the product solved. The hardware was a fantastically expensive solution to “I would like juice from a pouch,” and the pouches did fine without it. Several of Juicero’s lead investors later acknowledged, on and off the record, that they had not tried squeezing a pouch by hand before writing their checks.
Lessons
- A demo that’s never tested against the no-tech baseline (here: a pair of hands) hides whether the product is solving anything at all.
- Premium hardware tied to a captive consumable subscription only works if the hardware does something the consumable can’t do alone — Juicero inverted that.
- Charismatic founder + name-brand investors + glossy industrial design can substitute for diligence for years, until one journalist runs the obvious physical experiment.
- Selling a $700 device at a unit-cost loss while assuming subscription volume will rescue the math is a bet, not a business model, especially when the device is optional to the experience.
- When a product becomes a meme for the wrong reason, refunds and a new CEO are not a recovery plan — the brand collapse is the failure mode.