They had outstanding product-market fit. The _only_ problem is that the market of people who have juice bags and do not know how to open them (I.e. two year olds) do not make purchasing decisions.
On paper it makes sense to have a microprocessor guide the pressure used on fruit and vegetable pulp [0]. Between that and the introduction of software to manage the fruit supply chain, the Juicero embodied Marc Andreessen's prophecy [1].
Unfortunately, they got the verb wrong: software is eating _not_ drinking the world.
Of course not. However, it wasn’t prepackaged juice (liquid), it was pulp, the part of plants from which juice is squeezed.
Have you ever seen one of those machines in restaurants that from a hopper full of oranges, automatically slices, squeezes the juice into a glass and puts the rind etc into a composting bag? They do that to deliver a fresh glass of juice that people believe has a material difference from a can of frozen concentrate. Juicero was that but simplified and expanded to more than just oranges.
Consider the factory process of making different juices. Might use heat, introduce other molecules, etc. By performing part of the task in the factory and the final extraction onprem, there may be some meaningful differences in the consumable.
But sure, let’s all poke fun at something without considering the operational context.
> Have you ever seen one of those machines in restaurants that from a hopper full of oranges automatically slices, squeezes the juice into a glass and puts the rind etc into a composting bag