Juicero's $700 juicer was undone by one fact: you could squeeze the packs by hand

Juicero was a San Francisco startup founded in 2013 by Doug Evans that set out to reinvent juicing. Its product was the Juicero Press: a sleek, Wi-Fi-connected machine that squeezed proprietary single-serving packets of pre-chopped fruits and vegetables, sold by subscription for $5 to $7 each. The press launched in 2016 at $699 (later cut to $399), and between 2014 and 2017 the company raised about $120 million from prominent venture investors.

The unraveling came in April 2017, when Bloomberg News reported a devastating finding: the juice packs could be squeezed by hand, easily and effectively, producing nearly as much juice as the expensive machine. The story went viral. Here was a $700 internet-connected device — one that even scanned a QR code on each pack and required an iPhone app to work — whose core function a human hand could replicate. Juicero argued that hand-squeezing was messy and inferior, but the damage was done.

The company became an instant symbol of Silicon Valley excess: a venture capitalist who took the device apart called it 'an incredibly complicated piece of engineering' built without cost constraints, where a far simpler design would have produced much the same juice for hundreds of dollars less. Facing slow sales and ridicule, Juicero suspended sales in September 2017, offered refunds, and shut down, seeking a buyer. It is now a shorthand for over-engineered hardware that solves a problem no one had.