Exactly what range of processing is done to the fruits and vegetables before packaging? How effectively washed are they given what we now know about pesticides and cognitive development? How environmentally destructive is individual shipment of the packages? How disposal-friendly are the packages? Are fruits and vegetables sourced in season, locally or organically?
I think we can guess what the probable answers are.
Process...
Step 1: Pick a natural, functional, thing like a fruit.
Step 2: Hype the crap out of it (or wait until someone else does).
Step 3: Re-invent some part of it (eg. fruit skin) as an artificial product (eg. QR-coded spacepack) so that you can charge money for it, even though this is both unethical and wasteful, and actually less functional in many ways (eg. hard expiry, juice only output, damage less apparent, etc.) than the original.
Step 4: Sell a subscription.
Step 5: Obtain some kind of industrial protection racket through regulatory means, by claiming the natural alternative is unsanitary, of dubious or dangerously uncontrolled quality.
This is basically how a lot of the pharmaceutical industry works (with a few extra steps like co-opting/corrupting established points of community trust, integrating an insurance protection racket, etc.), as well as diet pills, cuisine fads, juice industry, etc.
Was this really the top US hardware startup last year?
For reference they claimed $120M, then fired their CEO and replaced him with a Coca Cola executive.
I did some further reading on the business and answered some of the questions I had. They have a 3-stage wash for inbound vegetables, however it does vary per ingredient. Since many people in the industry integrate chemicals such as chlorine during washing for sanitation purposes, there is a significant likelihood that they are too and therefore there likely remains a percentage of residue. Ingredients are sourced to their southern California facility for washing, cutting and packing for national redistribution to 17 states. It's a pretty carbon heavy operation.
But the Keurig is turning a small amount of raw material (coffee grounds) into lots of coffee. I don't understand how the Juicero is different than bottled juice.
Lots of people buy expensive juicers with the idea that they will drink more delicious healthy fresh juice. But then they never use them because it is a hassle. This way they can pretend that they are getting fresh juicer-style juice.
> different than bottled juice
Maybe no different than Suja or something like that. But they charge $8/bottle - so maybe Juicero is cheaper in the long run, even with the wildly overpriced dispenser.
I think we can guess what the probable answers are.
Process...
Step 1: Pick a natural, functional, thing like a fruit.
Step 2: Hype the crap out of it (or wait until someone else does).
Step 3: Re-invent some part of it (eg. fruit skin) as an artificial product (eg. QR-coded spacepack) so that you can charge money for it, even though this is both unethical and wasteful, and actually less functional in many ways (eg. hard expiry, juice only output, damage less apparent, etc.) than the original.
Step 4: Sell a subscription.
Step 5: Obtain some kind of industrial protection racket through regulatory means, by claiming the natural alternative is unsanitary, of dubious or dangerously uncontrolled quality.
This is basically how a lot of the pharmaceutical industry works (with a few extra steps like co-opting/corrupting established points of community trust, integrating an insurance protection racket, etc.), as well as diet pills, cuisine fads, juice industry, etc.
Was this really the top US hardware startup last year?