No More Juicero

Photo credit: Alan Levine, CC BY 2.0.

Remember the Juicero, that $400 Wi-Fi-connected juice squeezing machine that had the power to reject bags of fruit and vegetable pulp that it didn’t want to juice—if, for example, they were past their best-buy date, or if they were created by a third-party pulper—and that didn’t actually do anything you couldn’t do with your own bare hands?

Yeah, it’s dead now.

As Bloomberg reports:

Juicero Inc., the vegetable and fruit juice startup that raised more than $100 million from investors, said it will suspend sales, offer refunds to customers and search for a buyer for the company.

The decision to shut down its business comes four months after a Bloomberg News report that the company’s juice packets could be squeezed by hand and didn’t require Juicero’s machine, which cost $400. The machine had previously sold for $700, before the price cut.

I love that Bloomberg doesn’t quite take credit for Juicero’s demise, although plenty of other news orgs are attributing Juicero’s death to that particular piece of investigative journalism.

Anyway, we’ll all have to go back to juicing our fruits and vegetables the ordinary way, which probably means occasionally hand-juicing a bag of oranges and buying our carrot and apple juice at the grocery store.

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